Adeeba Shahid Talukder | A Song For My Nation

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Glass, Gulf Coast, Meridian, and The Margins, and her translations in PBS Frontline and Words Without Borders. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and an Emerging Poets fellowship from Poets House.

Adeeba Shahid Talukder's Website

Also by Adeeba Shahid Talukder: Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved The Gods of the Age Two Poems

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Rahguzar: The Path On Lightning and Rest What Is Not Beautiful

November 3, 2020
Poets Resist
2020 Elections
Special Feature

Adeeba Shahid Talukder

A Song For My Nation

— after Allen Ginsberg’s “America”

America, my love, your jewels perish, your seas blacken. America, we of water and clay melt in your chafing winters, your dusking streams. America, you’ve plundered the earth to build your shrine — your devotees return to their homes each night, dust-smeared, hands empty of bread. America, no one is dancing. America, your trucks fill with cold flesh, with sacred bodies. America, men shake and cry with death, shatter the mirrors of their own homes. America, satans guard your gates. They laugh and laugh. America, A man once told you: I can’t breathe. America, in prayer to what god did you kneel upon his neck, and stay? America, you’ve lit yourself on fire. America, you are red with fear. America, your weary cannot sleep. America, cleanse yourself. Press your wound until there is no more blood, until your walls stop shuddering. America, the river of language has broken. America, you are holy, your cities filled with saints, lovers drunk with jasmine. America, love, we are of you. Turn to us, raise us to glory like your stained- glass gods.

The poem was also recorded in audio form to be part of a short film titled An American Prayer:

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