Three Poems

Poetry ~ Anna Purves ​
​

Then I Was Refugee 

Let’s face it—this evening
when the truck they’ve promised
comes for me, this house
—all its floors and doors— will soon
 die back to the earth that formed it.
 
I’ll pack what I can on my back
but really, it’s not what I own
it’s what owns me.  It’s this air and sun
these beats and streets, scraped and shaped
by granddaddies of my granddads.
 
So small I must become to accept
that nothing of all that made me
will save me. To save--
ah, but you shrug, shake your head--
to play the game, you gotta pay.
 
For this one repeating heartbeat,
these two eyes, this lone pair of hands
that can grasp a stone--and hurl it--
I make my so-called choice to lose everything,
leave for what might as well be Mars.
 
How long can one breathe life into memory?
How many generations can a single mind
safely smuggle out?
It comes down to my life or my history
Tell me how I live without that.
~


Once Upon a Time, During the Years of Rage

There was this thing called hunger
and we ran after it over the fields.
We chased it through the frozen stubble
of onion stalks, past the cabbage rows.

On the edge of a black pine forest
we saw lights hovering low to the ground.
No firefly alive in that season of snow,
no fox pausing to glint us her eye.

The reaching branches scraped our hair,
pulled the blankets from our shoulders,
but deep as we went the skinny lights
never lingered long enough for us to grasp.

Soon we were lost, on a white carpet
muddled with roots, night shadows, footprints.
Our throats froze inside us, with nothing
to hear but the wind’s whip whipping.

There was this thing called hunger
and we wanted it so much.
~


Spaces

The things I know,
the things I know you know
the things I know you know aren't
what you need to know
 
the things I know you know
        aren't what you need to know about me.
 
The things I know you know about me
aren't anything like
        what you think you know.
 
The things you think about me
        and the things you want me to know
                are things that we may never know.
 
We may never know these things.
 
We may never know these things
        because then we would know them.
 
If we knew these things
        then we would know something
                that we don't want to know.
 
If we knew something
        that we didn't want to know
                then maybe we would know
                                that we really didn't know things.
 
If we didn't know these things
        did we love what we knew?
 
—or did we love the space between
what we knew about each other
        and what we didn't?
 ~

​

Anna Purves is a writer and artist. 
She teaches writing in the Macaulay Honors and Lehman Scholars programs at Lehman College/CUNY. 
Recent Poems Published
Even Steven:  Pure Slush
Gemstones: A Tanka Quintet in Voices of the Valley 
Awards
Team Emmy award for Best of the Bronx PSA video series:  as Script writer
Poetry Prize from Bronx Council on the Arts for Before and After
Fiction Prize from Bronx Council on the Arts  for Elena and the Minotaur

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