Black Poetry Tuesdays (August 22, 2023 Edition): "Sanctuary” by Donika Kelly

The week’s Black Poetry Tuesdays piece is from Donika Kelly. Donika Kelly is a Black American writer, poet, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length poetry collections Bestiary and The Renunciations. Bestiary is the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2016 and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award in 2017.

The following piece is called “Sanctuary.” In this piece, Kelly draws parallels between womanhood, the ocean, and its inhabitants, all strong yet mistreated and shackled by societal norms. The tones of liberation and the turn of phrase to act as if her words were fumbled when referring to the ocean and woman make this poem resonate on multiple levels.

Sanctuary

The tide pool crumples like a woman

into the smallest version of herself,

bleeding onto whatever touches her.

The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled

with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing

point, something brown breaks the surface—human,

maybe, a hand or foot or an island

of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp.

A wild life.

This is a prayer like the sea

urchin is a prayer, like the sea

star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber—

as if I know what prayer means.

I call this the difficulty of the non-believer,

or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god.

How to understand, then, what deserves rescue

and what deserves to suffer.

Who.

Or should I say, what must

be sheltered and what abandoned.

Who.

I might ask you to imagine a young girl,

no older than ten but also no younger,

on a field trip to a rescue. Can you

see her? She is led to the gates that separate

the wounded sea lions from their home and the class.

How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself:

to claim her own barking voice, to revel

in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers

woven into the cyclone fence.

You can learn more about Donika here.