Jimy Dawn’s debut collection of poetry, Sun and the Son, is raw and honest, but it also is filled with difficult truths and romantic hope.
Please welcome Jimy Dawn, who shares with us a poem from the collection and an audio reading of “cloud spotting.”
cloud spotting The other day a boy found a man playing in his backyard. He didn’t know what to do, so he asked the man to leave. The man wanted to play more but he thought it would be better if he left so as to not cause difficulties. He loved the boy but he didn’t know how to say it. The boy said he understood but there was nothing he could do. When he left his home for the last time the clouds looked anxious but he didn’t care because he knew what he was doing. There are some who stay, others who stay but leave and a few who leave. For a time he knew what to do and then, suddenly, he didn’t. That’s when he dreamt the clouds forming. He shot a man in Reno just to watch him die and as he left the scene a silent breeze slept through the leaves and left the trees with a life that passes through us and keeps us here for now because that’s who we are and all our names rhyme with wind anyways. The crime was not having done something, it was being someone. I have my father’s name. I think that was important to him, though he never told me.
Listen here:
About the Author:
I’m a Jew, so some of the world I write about came to me, along with my brown hair and eyes, at birth. But my family had been in America so long—since around the Civil War on both sides–that by my grandparents’ generation Yiddish was all but forgotten. Also, I grew up fancy, in Virginia, where I knew much more about horses and tennis than anything even vaguely related to Judaism or the Yiddish world that had been wiped out by the Nazi genocide. But then I went to college, where I fell headlong into what became a deep dive into Jewish literature and Hebrew, and there you have it: my muse began to speak to me with a Yiddish accent. The result being my new book, 
About the Poet:
