question_answer ANECDOTE Poems Born From Personal Loss ios_share
Saddiq Dzukogi wrote poems after his daughter Baha died 21 days after her first birthday.
The book Your Crib, My Qibla speaks to and about Baha as he and his family tend grief through ritual and memory.
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insights INSIGHT Myth As A Vessel For Grief ios_share
The poem uses imagination and myth to hold grief when facts cannot undo loss.
Dzukogi places time into Baha's hands so she can move back and forth across past and future.
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question_answer ANECDOTE A Ritual Of Buried Milk ios_share
Mira, Saddiq's wife, buried milk where the placenta had been buried as a ritual of tending grief.
That memory appears in the poem as buried milk nourishing a placenta to heal his broken bones and heart.
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Get the app A man whose baby daughter has died turns to stars, mythology, and imagination for solace. There, he encounters what might help, a little.
Saddiq Dzukogi is a poet and professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), and winner of the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Dzukogi is completing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
We’re pleased to offer Saddiq Dzukogi’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
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