Poetry Friday: Corona, Queens
To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets all month long [catch up on past week’s poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Shailja Patel]. Today’s featured work is “Corona, Queens,” by Bushra Rehman, a bi-coastal, Pakistani-American poet whose words sing of place, family, religion, and identity with an honest, insightful, and poignant sensibility. 
A few years ago, the Bowery Poetry Club and City Lore asked a bunch of NYC poets to write an epic poem about New York. Bushra was one of them, and of course, she wrote about Corona, Queens, the neighborhood where she lived as a child.
Corona, Queens
Fitzgerald called Corona the valley of ashes
when the Great Gatsby drove past it, but
we didn’t know about any valley of ashes
because by then it had been topped off by our houses,
the kind made from brick this tan color,
no self-respecting brick would be at all.We knew Corona,
home of World’s Fair relics
where it felt as if some ancient tribe
of white people had lived there long ago.
It was our own Stonehenge,
our own Easter Island sculptures
made from a time when New York City
and all the country
was imagining the world’s future.
Read the rest of this poem and find out why I think it’s a perfect accompaniment to the (currently showing) multimedia exhibit Crossing the Blvd: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America over at Sepia Mutiny, where I’m guest blogging this month.
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:10 am
Hey Sandhya,
Thanks for posting Bushra’s poem (or part of it)… I first heard her perform almost three years ago, and this reminded me how powerful of a poet she is… By the way, one of the links above seems to be broken… just fyi.