Mobile Photography & Art Saturday Poetry – ‘The Body Remembers’ by Yusef Komunyakaa with @poetry_fish
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘The Body Remembers’ by Yusef Komunyakaa. ‘The Body Remembers’, explains Komunyakaa, ‘sprung out of my memory of swimming in a creek in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in the 1950s when the entire culture was still segregated—especially in any joyful display of the body. However, we boys often took risks and, coming back to that past stitched with youthful energy, perhaps our bravado was fuelled by a public dare. Such a moment of play is full of celebration, especially during the months of July and August. But also, there is a reality to our naïve recklessness—and there, in the danger of such moments, we learned to come together as brothers.’
Komunyakaa first received wide recognition following the 1984 publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems built from colloquial speech which demonstrated his incorporation of jazz influences.
I have matched this image entitled ‘Summer Screens’ – by @poetry_fish, with this poem.
You can view and follow her work on Instagram here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
The Body Remembers by Yusef Komunyakaa
I stood on one foot for three minutes & didn’t tilt
the scales. Do you remember how quickly
we scrambled up an oak leaning out over the creek,
how easy to trust the water to break
our glorious leaps? The body remembers
every wish one lives for or doesn’t, or even horror.
Our dance was a rally in sunny leaves, then quick
as anything, Johnny Dickson was up opening
his arms wide in the tallest oak, waving
to the sky, & in the flick of an eye
he was a buffalo fish gigged, pleading
for help, voiceless. Bigger & stronger,
he knew every turn in the creek past his back door,
but now he was cooing like a brown dove
in a trap of twigs. A water-honed spear
of kindling jutted up, as if it were the point
of our folly & humbug on a Sunday afternoon, right?
Five of us carried him home through the thicket,
our feet cutting a new path, running in sleep
years later. We were young as condom-balloons
flowering crabapple trees in double bloom
& had a world of baleful hope & breath.
Does Johnny run fingers over the thick welt
on his belly, days we were still invincible?
Sometimes I spend half a day feeling for bones
in my body, humming a half-forgotten
ballad on a park bench a long ways from home.
The body remembers the berry bushes
heavy with sweetness shivering in a lonely woods,
but I doubt it knows words live longer
than clay & spit of flesh, as rock-bottom love.
Is it easier to remember pleasure
or does hurt ease truest hunger?
That summer, rocking back & forth, uprooting
what’s to come, the shadow of the tree
weighed as much as a man.
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
