Celeste Snowber: the marrow of longing

Click to watch a video presentation of this poem, performed by the author.


longing resides in the marrow

an ache for a land I do not know

terrain inside the cavities

of my chest, asking to be

made familiar with the territory

of a place where one knows

b e l o n g I n g

she spoke of a land she never knew

over and over again I heard the

tales of leaving when one or two years old in genocide

as if time had passed and she was ten or twenty

longing for a land was bred in my mother

perhaps her parents ached for the Armenia

they left, and even the beauty of Cambridge, Massachusetts

could not equal what was in their cells

the body has a way of knowing roots

place of viscera – soles of feet are souls

knowing where earth has raised them

I am a child raised between land and sea

borders between is where I find home

an ache is still reaching inside to find

the earth in my body

my body in the earth

Longing is the passage

it is not to be fixed

but to recognize what is always

present on the inside.

Celeste Nazali Snowber