Love Sonnet for Earth
by Ayesha Raees
Otto G. Richter Library, Floor 1

Ayesha Raees display, currently on view at the Otto G. Richter Library, Floor 1, has been inspired by the book “Ghost Of” by Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Raees work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, G/god and displacement, and mental illness while possessing a strong agency for accessibility, community, and change. She cultivates relationships between the word and the image through paint, theatrical performance, filmic visual imagery, and documentary photography.

Raees holds fellowships and support from from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, Millay Colony For the Arts, Cave Canem, Bennington, and elsewhere. Her work has been displayed at Lahore Contemporary Museum of Art, PatchWorks Gallery, Canvas Gallery, and elsewhere. She educated herself in Visual Arts, Poetry, Theatre, and Identity Politics from Bennington College and is currently doing a MFA in poetry with a focus on visual hybrid studies from University of Miami. Her first book of hybrid poetry won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press and is nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

The display includes several other inspirational books including Revising life : Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems, by Susan R. Van Dyne; Autobiography of red : a novel in verse by Anne Carson; and Citizen : an American lyric by Claudia Rankine.

Love Sonnet for Earth

There is a whale singing dry in the sky.
The ocean empties towards its mercy.
Up. The whale is cloud. Up. Noosed battle cry.
I knew once of God that made Earth with tree.
I knew once of Earth that made God its call.
I cook with blue paint-stained hands: fish, soup, greased
salt, carcass, glass shards, my heart throws up all
the water I once drank freely. I steer
my bones. I anchor them in the middle
of the whale’s shadow marking the empty
ocean floor. All the beauty I know starts
to conquer my lifeline. My breath runs blue.
The blue runs to me. The whale keeps singing.
I hold my hands to catch its every plea.