The Boy-Seeking will never understand how His father readsby osmosis. each night, falling asleep, one ear open, [steadfast] as a plant drawing breath, eating darkness. each morning, rising, eyesstraining through a new light, turning to dust. is it possible to listen [in] a new language? The Boy-Seeking has before fallen asleep only to be wokenwith a start, [our] memories rearranging the bones of His ear like a boxer’s after a bout. all of a sudden struck, all of a sudden the [purpose] of life proddingthe hard softness of his scalp. is it possible to be changed, just like that? is there such thing as successful revolution? to awaken His father’s fear that his boy, seeking,might never find home. that He’ll find home, but home won’t be with him. how to reconcile the [we] & [now]? to learn one, must He losethe other? another thing He’ll never understand: how to write that word they called Him. how to forgive His own tongue. for years He’ll erase &[press] space for pause. He’ll plummet down deep ocean canyons, looking through eyes that aren’t His own, & back to His father, awake, hand resting onHis spine, saying shhh & I don’t want you to be haunted for the rest of your life. maybe we do become what we’re called [on] to be. or maybeit’s just too painful, the alternative, that His father never sleeps.
Book of Sleep
“many of us don’t even believe in god, but each night we come and on god we call for the others, for those who died, for me, for you, for Iran. the voices are coming from far away. They leave you shaken . . . I wonder if god is shaking too”
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“Book of Sleep” from BOOK OF KIN: by Darius Atefat-Peckham.
Published by Autumn House Press in October 25, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Darius Atefat-Peckham.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of Book of Kin, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize (October, 2024) and editor of his mother’s, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). His work has recently appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Harvard. He is currently a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.
Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.”
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