Poet Tishani Doshi Reads Her Summer Poem

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Hey, we're not quite done with summer, which means we're not quite done with talking with poets on this program about what summer means to them.

Tishani Doshi wrote a poem called "Visiting My Parents In Summer." She writes about the way that summer flattens time; the past and the present mingle. She writes of returning to her childhood bedroom, knowing it's preserved just that she left it as a teenager.

TISHANI DOSHI: Layering it with your present - it's always a strange feeling for me because you know, you enter that space and you become all of the people that you've ever been.

INSKEEP: Making a journey, according to Doshi, from child to teenager to adult in a single hazy afternoon.

DOSHI: (Reading) Visiting my parents in summer, it seems they have always been here. These crows outside the window whom I cannot see but hear, it seems they have been making their noise for such a long time. I can no longer remember what it was like before. Perhaps it was summer and there were leaves on the ground from trees silently dying. Perhaps it is still summer and all you are doing is listening to your life pass by in a single afternoon. Here is your childhood room. Here are the distances between sleeps and here are the crows outside the window, singing their harsh song, listening.

INSKEEP: That's Tishani Doshi reading "Visiting My Parents In Summer." Her latest collection of poems is called "Everything Begins Elsewhere."

It's NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.