Sign

Sahar Romani

^{After Rumi, After Terrance Hayes}

What aren’t you willing to believe. A heart  
graffitied fuchsia on the street, a missive from another life.  
Remember the stem of lavender you found
in a used copy of Bishop’s poems, a verse underlined:  
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. Suddenly, across the aisle  
a woman with your mother’s bracelets, her left wrist  
all shimmer and gold, you almost winced.  
Coincidence is the great mystery of the human mind
but so is the trans-oceanic reach of Shah Rukh Khan’s  
slow blink. Each of us wants a hint, a song
that dares us to look inside. True, it takes whimsy  
and ego to believe the universe will tap your shoulder  
in the middle of a random afternoon. That t-shirt  
on a stranger’s chest, a bumper sticker on the highway upstate.  
Truth isn’t going anywhere. It’s your eyes passing by.

Copyright © 2024 by Sahar Romani. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

more poetry

about this poem

“While writing this poem, I was carrying several other poems in my heart and head: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sandpiper,’ Terrance’s Hayes’s ‘Oracle,’ Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi from the collection Gold, as well as the voice of my friend Nitika, who often spots hearts unexpectedly across cityscapes. I sometimes wonder about the relationship between sightings and significance, encounter and chance. This poem led me toward one answer. A future poem, I suspect, would lead to another.”
—Sahar Romani

related poems

this month’s guest editor

Thanks to Victor Hernández Cruz, author of Beneath the Spanish (Coffee House Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Hernández Cruz’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

support poem-a-day

“Poem-a-Day is brilliant because it makes space in the everyday racket for something as meaningful as a poem.” —Tracy K. Smith

If this series is meaningful to you, join the community of Poem-a-Day supporters by making a gift today. Now serving more than 320,000 daily subscribers, this publication is only possible thanks to the contributions of readers like you.