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Anodyne [1]

Poetry [2]
9.22.20

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Anodyne [3],” he writes an ode to his body and its survival, and catalogues the parts of his body that make it his own with lines such as: “I love my crooked feet / shaped by vanity & work” and “The white moons / on my fingernails.” As the poem progresses, the images transform and expand to mythological proportions: “this spleen floating / like a compass needle inside / nighttime, always divining / West Africa’s dusty horizon.” Write an ode to your body that starts with the crooked parts and continues by going past the physical into the mythological.


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/anodyne

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/anodyne [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/poetry [3] https://poetrysociety.org/features/ars-poetica/yusef-komunyakaa