[Digital Poetics 4.26] Live Air (For Peter Gizzi) by Azad Ashim Sharma

One of those mornings trying the ideas wake me as birdsong I can listen to them ‘cause
they’re here a sun raises its shift with darkness. 

In break with air gathered in grey all these threads you’ve strewn a longing we share your
smile lifts all the moods. 

That articulation of pneumatic love we keep for this world and how I’m dying to stay with
breath – sharp and discursive. 

I write into your poetry like a seeker watching for the changing nodes of tradition, I’ll be
buried on that horizon, its open sky. 

That waved pulse of air, the Heart to the Line, between poetry as friendship across ages, that
we’ve been fighting tyrants for eons. 

You said that is the purpose of doing it and I’ll follow those scented traces through the ruins
of sociality, our joy of particular pitch with sadness. 

Salt threads down  our renewed faces, our skin could shine with crafted rage;–we are bloated
by the Word fierce with examples. 

The ancestral stature of hope, how you are taking flowers for Prynne and your voice will
always echo around his reading room. 

It echoes back to this poem in the wind across one of these mornings, O the live air of it all in
the space between your lines. 

You’ll find me enjoying the recline of cadence and it’s not so different, this morning, the wait
before daybreaks as a storm 

Now to slow down the rhythm of jungle to the dubplate spinning across the Atlantic loud
with gesture, wit and grace. 

Your poems accompany me to the classroom and the young bloods of Croydon knows your
breath now, the old-timers in my local fellowship do too.

Your great lesson was the transferral of poetry into world-making, this aesthetic life I was so
shook to live yet shaken by as I live it continually. 

It doesn’t do anyone any good to write basic with politics, too cute with morality, it’s sealant
around all music in the air. 

Your presence in this moment a lighthouse or the decision to visit one made easier than free
indirect discourse and a hard working semicolon.

It’s all about the spirit you’re saying to me over corduroy drinks watching the birds come
down from the sky like premonitions.

The kinship we share mapped onto invisible cities an alfresco from the future we’re urging
ourselves towards in the uncanniness of the day.

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Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and serves as poetry editor at Philosophy and Global Affairs and the CLR James Journal. He is a PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books, 2024). His second collection Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) was the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award. He lives in South London.