I Say the Sky

In the “Postscript” to her second poetry collection, I Say the Sky, Nadia Colburn describes her writing process, and how the poems in this book came to be:

I wrote many of these poems when I woke with the dawn, or after meditating, when they would come quickly, as if they had been forming and were waiting for a release.

Colburn’s poems “meet the self in the present, [and] go back and witness the self in the past,” reconciling the different aspects of her identity while also acknowledging and accepting the person she has become. Colburn is in dialogue with the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk and mindfulness mentor, as is evident in “4 a.m.”:

            when I wake up,
            when I put on my clothes,

            when I brush my teeth:
Brushing my teeth and rinsing my mouth,

I vow to speak purely and lovingly.
            And still my heart longs.

(The lines in italics are direct quotes from Hanh’s book Stepping into Freedom. An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training.) The poem embodies the practice of mindfulness by listing daily actions as affirmations that keep the speaker grounded in the present. At the same time, the last line acknowledges that mindfulness can be a struggle, because it’s not always easy to be with oneself: “Oh: let me accept / each day a small part // of this orbiting loneliness.”

Many of these poems grapple with loss, grief, and memories of trauma and abuse: “I know what it is / to be touched // as a thing,” while also working toward resolution: “My body is my / own body. I survive.” I Say the Sky is an invitation to the quiet spaces of the mind, to witness the miracle that is life and the wonder of the human body, and to the act of deep listening: “Let me listen / to myself.”