February 5th, 2026, 12:00 pm. Spring's arrival teases through sounds of laughter and conversation. On the glade, bright yellow balls bounce throughout the air. In between games of spikeball, one friend lunges to catch a frisbee thrown slightly further than arm’s reach. Amid the final months of winter, the California sun seeps effortlessly through the windows of the Morrison Library. It caresses the spines of the meticulously organized books, bringing a slight glint to the golden imprinted letters of book titles. As the room begins to fill, the library staff hurries to grab additional chairs for incoming attendees, some of whom opt to simply stand. While spring has yet to arrive, the sounds of movement are reminiscent of bees in pollination. Everyone gathered is patiently waiting for Aracelis Girmay. 12:10 pm, hurried conversations fade into quiet whispers and soon — silence.

The Lunch Poems Series, hosted by the UC Berkeley Library and English department, are held in the Morrison Library on the first Thursday of every month. Open to the public, this series is an opportunity for students and faculty to escape the stress of everyday life at Berkeley and listen to world-class poets perform their pieces.

This particular reading welcomed poet Aracelis Girmay. A California native, Girmay was born to a family of Eritrean and Puerto Rican parents. Including her most recent book, Green of All Heads, (BOA, 2025), Girmay has published four collections of poetry: The Black Maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). Beyond poetry, Girmay has worked as an essayist, editor, and educator. Her writing explores a myriad of themes such as community, migration, memory, justice, and the histories of the African diaspora. Blending lyrical storytelling with political and historical reflection, Girmay centers her writing on collective care and resistance, while simultaneously exploring how language can hold grief, love, and survival. In her poetry, Girmay frequently draws on her diasporic identity and transnational history. Her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies such as Astra, e-flux, the Paris Review, Periphery Journal, and The Yale Review. Girmay has received major honors for her writing, including the Whiting Award, and she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. Currently, Girmay teaches creative writing at Stanford University and has been involved in literary initiatives that support and publish poets from the African continent and diaspora, including the African Poetry Book Fund. Through her poetry, teaching, and editorial work, Girmay continues to contribute to contemporary literature by expanding conversations about belonging, history, and the power of language to imagine more just futures.

The reading drew mainly from Girmay’s most recent collection of poems, Green of All Heads.  Conceived in the liminal space between tragic loss and new life, Girmay’s collection depicts her personal exploration of the natural entanglement between an aging parent and her newly born child. While death is at the center of these poems, for Girmay it is not indicative of a final ending. Describing the cultural influences on her body of work, Girmay emphasizes how death in African-based cosmologies is not an end of existence, but rather a shift in status from the physical into the metaphysical. This concept of death is explored in the very first poem of the collection, “December.” Read by UC Berkeley’s own Professor Geoffrey O’Brien, “December” served as an introduction to Girmay and her work. As a student in O'Brien's course on American poetry the last semester, I was always entranced by his deep analysis and interpretation of poetic verse and prose poetry. His extensive knowledge of the literary archive and poetic techniques was on display as he primed the audience for Girmay's reading.

While Green of All Heads is divided into five distinct sections, the poem “December” stands alone. The title is fitting for the book's themes of death, marking the end of the seasonal cycle. Yet O'Brien interpreted this poem in the broader context of the collection, describing the book as “a set of poems which thinks its peoples past their deaths, as December gives way to January.” While December indicates the year's end, the passage of time and life itself does not conclude. O'Brien's interpretation perfectly framed the narrative thread Girmay crafts through her collection of poems. His close reading expressed the transformative essence of death, refuting the common interpretation that death and loss are final. In O’Brien’s analysis, he emphasized these specific lines:

Uncle is, swishing away the flies
Mother is, pouring black coffee through their hair

Girmay's unconventional comma usage acts to break apart the straightforward syntax of the sentence. In doing so, Girmay creates an emphasis on the phrases “Uncle is” and “Mother is,” and thus her tone becomes one of declaration. Girmay is not simply describing the actions of her uncle or mother, she is stating their existence. These lines represent the ability, or rather, inability of death to kill relations. While one generation of relatives may have passed, their culture, customs, and habits carry on through the existence of their children and the generations after.

Back in Morrison Library,  Girmay approached the podium to a field of applause. Before beginning her reading, she took a subtle yet thoughtful glance around the room. Thanking O’Brien for the gracious introduction, she quickly remarked, “so many parts of life, people in life, here.” Fixated on the poetry, I had neglected to observe the audience of which I was a part. In taking a glance for myself, I realized just how acute her description was. Within the room, there were undergraduate students whom I had seen in my own classes, professors from all departments, graduate students diligently writing notes in their notebooks, and community members who were simply admirers of Girmay’s work. As Girmay began to read her poems, this idea of existence through action and community began to resonate deeply within me. While each person lived their individual life, they were present in their interaction with Girmay’s poetry. This gathering of community, cultivated by Girmay, was evidence that shared experiences could transcend the individuality of life and the finality of death.

This theme of transcendent connection is embodied in the poem “Ceremony for Remembering the Doorless World.” Girmay described the poem as “thinking about the strangeness of time, and how many times we are thinking of, possessed by, at once.” She opens the poem with the line, “where three we-horses mark ground.” The poem explores recurring themes of death, birth, and new motherhood. However, rather than addressing these experiences individually, the poem emphasizes their interaction, as if all three are occurring simultaneously. In the final stanzas, she writes:

so we are three & simultaneous earths inside
your coil of fatherhair to which I press my ear to hear
The historians, then the bell

The processes of birth, motherhood, and death can be interpreted as stages separate from one another. However, as O’Brien highlighted in his introduction to “December,” the mark of an ending does not signify a final conclusion but rather the beginning of a new status. In “Ceremony for Remembering the Doorless World,” Girmay goes further than simply defying conclusions; her use of imagery transcends temporal boundaries. She presents birth, motherhood, and death as events that occur simultaneously. In the line “So we are three & simultaneous earths inside,” the plural phrasing of “earths” and its intentional placement work to connect the three stages through maternity. Across many cultures, the earth is commonly referred to as a maternal figure. The plural “earths” may indicate the distinction between the realms of the grandfather, mother, and son. However, the specific image of earth ultimately unites the three, as they are all connected through the mother. The father, once born from his own mother, is now connected to his grandson through the daughter he raised, linking all three through maternity. Furthermore, the enjambment between “inside” and the following line emphasizes how the relationship between the mother and the grandfather is strengthened through the son. The imagery of hair can be associated with long histories and lessons held within its coils and fibers. The mother learns these lessons, pressing her head into the “fatherhair” and passing them down through the nurturing of her son. Through this interconnectedness, Girmay suggests that there is no true separation between the grandfather, mother, and son; instead, each exists in relation to and in influence upon the others. Although these experiences occur at different moments in time, they remain connected and thus transcend linear time.

To conclude her reading, Girmay left the room on a brighter note. For her final poem, she chose, “When I come home they rush to me, the flies.” Describing her inspiration for the piece, Girmay recalls her experiences with intimacy. She likened the poem to “flashes of intimacy, when a beetle or a fly or a flower, suddenly in the perceiving of it, feels full of its life force. And how sometimes that life force feels like it carries the life force of loved ones.” The experience of a fly landing on oneself is ubiquitous, and yet I personally had never interpreted this experience as a rush of intimate love. Rather, I associated the rushing of flies to the natural process of decay. While the poem does touch on themes of familial loss and separation, it does so to emphasize the main rush of love that occurs when the poet does finally return home. There is a whimsical element to her tone, detailing the small nuances that are only noticed when one has been away for a long period of time. She describes the familial foods that taste of nostalgia and the fulfilled yearning of parents who have missed their child for so long: “As I chew they touch my hair, they touch their hands to my crumbs, joining me. The milky lake above which. They ask me for a story: How does it begin? Before I was a child, and so on.” As time and life create distance between loved ones, Girmay describes how distance cannot break the ties that connect family. Rather, she shows how distance only allows for love to expand, so much so that, upon arrival, it erupts into a rush of intimacy.

1:00 pm. As Aracelis Girmay closes her copy of Green of All Heads, there is a moment of silence. With everyone at a loss for words, the experience that brought us all together has come to an end. Then, the room which usually houses silence is suddenly flooded with applause and gratitude. As I gather my things and leave Morrison Library, I re-enter the world of Berkeley. By hurried footsteps, flustered conversations about midterms, and garbage bins overflowing with coffee cups, I am reminded of the overwhelming stress that students here are so familiar with. While it is hard not to slip into this environment, Girmay’s words challenge this sense of constant pressure. Her lessons on intimacy create a greater sensitivity to the subtleties of what it means to not simply exist, but live. Yes, Berkeley is a stressful place for students, faculty, and beyond. However, it is also one of the premier institutions for progressive education where thousands of people converge from around the world to collaborate and learn from one another. While I may not know every individual undergrad or graduate student, we are all connected. Girmay’s poetry reading is a small representation of what makes the community of Berkeley beautiful. I, like many students, am in the pursuit of a greater understanding of what it means to be my own individual. Sometimes, this pursuit can be muddled by anxiety, stress, and other external factors. Yet stopping on the glade on a Tuesday afternoon, watching the people bathe in the sun and play games of catch, I am reminded of why I am here. Like the flash of intimacy of a fly landing on a shoulder, our lives are shaped by the small interactions we share with one another. And while these interactions may be stretched by physical distance and time, Girmay reminds us how intimate relationships transcend all barriers — even death.