Kazim Ali, July

  

we lay down in the graveyard

hinged there...

lovely moss growing in the letters, 

 

 

then the green in the moss and trees went up and joined the gray in the sky

 

 

then the sky came down by breaths into my skin

and sipped me

 

-Kazim Ali, from July

 

The lines in Kazim Ali's poem “July” are worlds, and when spoken aloud come out smooth yet leave the reader breathless by their sheer emotional weight. The experience captured by the poem’s narrator is not immediately definable, yet “July” instantly achieves the classic goals of poetry—truth and beauty are grasped upon first reading it. Truth is reached because the reader can sense a poignant human experience is at hand. Beauty achieved through the lyrical prayer-type offering of the words.  

 

Ali is a poet who touches the reader’s emotions by using visceral images. The story within “July” comes secondly, as the images and rhythm of words alone are enough to provide pleasure. The large gaps, found both in the spacing between stanzas and in the poem’s content, allow the reader to fill in the blanks by using their imagination. 

Through simple language and a short poem, “July” describes a spiritual communion with the earth at the site of a graveyard. The poem is more than lying hinged in a cemetery (the word choice “hinge” first causes metal to come to mind, relating the human beings to an inanimate objects, and second makes it seem as though the people physically center and support the graveyard), it's a transcendental witness of divinity found in nature and rebirth found in death. The fact that moss, dark, green, thick, and alive, is growing within the letters of a headstone foreshadows a transformation from aged marker of death to euphoric peak of new life. 

As if pinned to the ground in an amazed trance the narrator says dreamily, “then the green in the moss and trees went up and joined the gray in the sky,” the green from the plant life rises and enters the gravestone gray of the sky.  The climax is again stated dreamily, “then the sky came down by breaths into my skin/and sipped me.”  The poem ends with the feeling that the graveyard landscape, which has been transposed into the sky, is making love with the narrator.  Rather than the human(s) in the poem taking nourishment from the elements, the elements are breathing and drinking from the human being(s). The sky enters the narrator, and the reader is also left feeling sipped by moss green sky.

It could also be that “July” is describing actually lying with a living or dear departed beloved. The fact that a cemetery, traditionally a place to pay tribute to one’s ancestors and loved ones, is the site for such wonder and revelation seems to recognize the mysteriousness of the afterlife, and perhaps some of the power of “July” is that it is a poem about receiving comfort and love from a friend, family member, partner, or lover who exists beyond life.