Green of All Heads

“…is liturgy, is prayer, is GREEN OF ALL HEADS, for the living and for the dead; for the quotidian and for the extraordinary.  Precipitated by the unexpected transition of her father to the realm of the Ancestors, the poet Aracelis Girmay decodes the Great Code that is poetry to bring to the ‘smallest bone of (our) ear’ the single memory that is love, fecund in its singularity. Alongside the poet we pace the rhythms of grief as well as the everyday to approach the revelation that while death never rhymes with life, it provides us the extended bassline riff supporting our livity —those bright, bold notes echoing the sound we were and are and will be running out of this life. …is benediction, is prayer, is eulogy, is chant; is mourning ground, is grief, genealogies of; is life, is is & am, is altar, is GREEN OF ALL HEADS, filmy netsela of blessings gently landing on our heads to embrace, to hold our fragile mortality, ever luminous in the ordinary.” —m. nourbeSe philip, author of She Tries Her Tongue – Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong!

Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. 

This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural – flowers, speech – to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: “-- i am learning to lift -- my voice -- like a flower -- in -- a field of flowers --” The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.