D. Nurkse is an American poet, translator, and human rights activist. He has served as poet laureate of Brooklyn, and teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York.
How We Are Made Light
Pity the visitors
bent under shopping bags,
who have kept their huge hats
here where there are no seasons,
who run from station to station
with a question so inconsequential
even we patients smile.Admire the nurse and the aide
who fill out a form,
one beginning at the front, the other at the end,
speaking of Bon Jovi;
the doctors, washing side by side,
discussing an even greater doctor;most of all, revered the orderlies
who have come from across the sea
to wheel us through the corridors
to a place where we will be tested,
where we will finally belong
even more inherently than here,
where we will no longer be watchers
but the matter itself,
flesh and soul transposed
to degrees on a scale of radiance.