April 14, 2026: You Are Who I Love, Aracelis Girmay
You Are Who I Love Aracelis Girmay
You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart
You, in the park, feeding the pigeons You cheering for the bees
You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats
You protecting the river You are who I love delivering babies, nursing the sick
You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose
You taking your medicine, reading the magazines
You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.
You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe
You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet
You are who I love, you reciting Darwish, then June
Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts
You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal
You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
You are who I love weeping or touching the faces of the weeping
You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream
You carrying your brother home You noticing the butterflies
Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens
You who did and did not survive You who cleaned the kitchens You who built the railroad tracks and roads You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.
You who the borders crossed You whose fires You decent with rage, so in love with the earth You writing poems alongside children
You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder You are who I love, summoning the courage, making the cobbler,
getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds
You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail
You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations
You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick
You are who I love, sighing in your sleep
You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut
You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still
You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses
You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand
You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to
You studying stars, you are who I love braiding your child’s hair
You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert
You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,
bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late
You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home
You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often
You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love I love
your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there
How “Fuck you” becomes a love song
You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face
You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who
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Also! + Dead Stars, Ada Limón + from Moon for Aisha, Aracelis Girmay
Keep going:
2025: Sorrows, Lucille Clifton 2024: The Wordsworth Effect, Joyce Sutphen 2023: Spring Poem, Colleen O’Connor 2022: Red, Mary Ruefle 2021: Bathing, Allison Seay 2020: A Small Moment, Cornelius Eady 2019: You Meet Someone and Later You Meet Their Dancing and You Have to Start Again, David Welch 2018: Henry Clay’s Mouth, Thomas Lux 2017: When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me, Tracy K. Smith 2016: Eve Recollecting the Garden, Grace Bauer 2015: from I Love A Broad Margin To My Life, Maxine Hong Kingston 2014: Gift, Czeslaw Milosz 2013: This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin 2012: We Did Not Make Ourselves, Michael Dickman 2011: Happiness (3), Jean Valentine 2010: When I Think, Jeanne Marie Beaumont 2009: The Poem, Franz Wright 2008: Morning Poem, Robin Becker 2007: Supple Cord, Naomi Shihab Nye 2006: Wish For a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke 2005: The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy, Jeffrey McDaniel
