23 Aug The Poem You’ve Been Waiting For by Tarfia Faizullah
leaning in to see if I was readyyet to go where he has been waiting
to take me. I saw then the gnawing
sounds my faith has been making
and I saw too that the shape it sings
in is the color of cast-iron mountains
I drove so long to find I forgot I had
been looking for them, for the you
I once knew and the you that was born
waiting for me to find you. I have been
twisting and turning across these lifetimes
where forgetting me is what you do
so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw
that I would drown in a creek carved out
of a field our incarnations forged the first path
through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll
with me there again for the first time, to pause
and sprawl in the grass while I read to you
the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting
to hear. I read until you finally slept
and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest.
You’re always driving so far from me towards
the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there,
awake, keeping watch while you snored.
I waited, as I always seem to, for you
to wake up and come back to me.
About the Poet
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of the poetry collections, Alien of Extraordinary Ability (forthcoming from Haymarket Books 2027), Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in The Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, The New Republic, The Nation, and Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Tarfia currently lives in Dallas.
Related Event
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- On Saturday, August 29th at 7:30 p.m., poet Tarfia Faizullah will join 2026 JBLC Poetry Fellow Siew Hii as featured performers at a Just Buffalo Literary Center Silo City Reading Series event also featuring a musical performance by Olivia Block, and an installation by visual artist D. Sloan.Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo-based bookseller Fitz Books.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.