The Poetry Stash: 07Mar2024

2085 by Sandra M. Gilbert

Today’s poem is “2085” by Sandra M. Gilbert from the collection Blood Pressure. The book is available for purchase here.

2085 by Sandra M. Gilbert

It’s 2085, you’re walking on a dirt road
in Sicily, you’re my blood-
kin, a seventeen-year-old girl

with black curls and a faint smudge of
shadow on your upper lip.
				Have you

come from New York to find lost ancestors,
or have you always been here?
Dry hills, stacks of heat,

tower around you; nearby, there are goats, donkeys, chickens,
a smell of dung simmering,
and smoke, grain, rosmarino;

in the sky, a track of supersonic light—
but you don’t look up, you’re reading, thinking,
trying to imagine the past,

and my sentences won’t help you, though they
brood in you like chromosomes:
					I can’t

tell you who I was, in my queer costume,
with my modern ideas.
					My words

stand in the fields beside you—
stones, dead trees—the way
the land you walk through

stood behind me, an unknown monument.
And now the road unfolds and shines ahead
like the history neither of us understands.

It turns you
toward the sea, toward
the inarticulate Aegean.

Prompts:

1.	Begin with “It’s 2085…”
2.	Begin with “I can’t tell…”
3.	Draft a letter from your past self to your future self.
4.	Draft a letter from your future self to your current self.

5. Photo by Artūras Kokorevas. Use this image as a writing prompt.

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