Kamilah Aisha Moon is a recipient of fellowships from several literary organizations such as the Rose O’Neill Literary House and the Vermont Studio Center. Kamilah Aisha Moon’s work has been featured widely, including Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets and Prairie Schooner. A Pushcart Prize winner, her poetry collection She Has a Name (Four Way Books) was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle. Moon has taught English and Creative Writing for many organizations and institutions, most recently as a Visiting Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Featured nationally in conferences and venues that include the Library of Congress, she has been selected as a New American Poet presented by the Poetry Society of America. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and her next poetry collection with Four Way Books is forthcoming in 2017.
This is an EXCERPT from Kamilah Aisha Moon's poem, Net Worth: Sandy Ground's Harvest, which can be read in full in Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City's Forgotten Waterfront.
Where is the water
we can wade in as captains,
not captives? Drag nets
& till loam the color
of children's faces?
We'll go there—to Prince's Bay
& Arthur Kill, sharpening
oyster knives the whole way,
chanting songs of Zion
to guide & gild worn shoes.
Pearl-seekers, if some weeped
it was while we worked,
dredging up succulent lives
we were never meant to have.