My grandma came with rice, fried tilapia, plantain, green cabbage.Ivy grows between me and my grandma.My uncle smoked coke in the shednicked grandma’s rent moneyand my shoes.He lives between Iblis’ poetryand the tears of the wind.We tried to bury my uncle’s addiction beneath hopeburn it with reproaches.Addiction easily rots away a whole house.At age nine I began to steal.I thought my teenage mother would love me moreif I could give her diamond earrings.That she’d never hit me again.Tilapia bones and rice stick to my fingers.I take a sip of chai — cinnamon and clove on my tongue.Grandma wants me to hang up the laundry and do the dishes.The voice of the wind rustles in the gooseberry bush.The voice of the wind and the song of the robins make love.
The Wind Is a Forgiveness, the Wind Is Always New
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“The Wind Is a Forgiveness, the Wind Is Always New” by Alara Adilow.
Published by The Manhattan Review
English Translation Copyright © 2025 by Judith Wilkinson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Alara Adilow is a Dutch poet of Somali descent. The poem, which focuses on her origins, is from her acclaimed collection, Mythen en stoplichten, to be published in translation by Shearsman this year (title: Myths and Traffic Lights). The book explores questions of identity and grapples with Adilow’s transformation from man to woman, balancing between the grotesque and the lyrical, and juxtaposing her Somali background against urban life in Amsterdam.
Judith Wilkinson is an award-winning poet and translator. Her most recent translated collection is Miriam Van hee’s Sediment of Light (Shoestring 2025). This year will also see the publication of Alara Adilow’s Myths and Traffic Lights and a new collection of Wilkinson’s own poetry, Sphinx Moth.
Volume 21, No. 2
New York, New York
Founding Editor
Philip Fried
Cover Editor
Lynn Saville
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