- First Sight
A beginning, and like a newborn you’re dazzled by sight. After 50 years a corridor is no longer a corridor, a window is solid, holds a picture like a movie screen. The doctors have undone a lifetime of darkness— for what? You still close your eyes, won’t turn on lamps at home.
The city seems a mirage, dishonest with constant movement, or so shy it flattens into image, then shimmers. Seeing is strange! Free of the dark, sharp spots of color float, shapes wave, bounce—an endless cacophony of surfaces. You’re vulnerable, trying to fashion it all into a tapestry that means this I know.
This knowledge is surrender, faith. You’ve yet to learn you cannot hold these shapes in your hands, like objects that marry this world to you. Eyes closed, all things are yours, in three or more dimensions. Open, they seem flirtatious as stars—winking, distant, beyond touch, receding with the light.
Selected works by Sharan Strange:
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• First Sight
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• Hunger
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• Natural Occurrences
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• Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969
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• Dorothy
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• Mule
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• February 19,1994
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• Ash
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• The Unintended Life
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• The Factory
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• The Stranger
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• The Body
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• An Interview with Sharan Strange
Sharan Strange, a member of the Dark Room Collective, teaches literature and social studies at Parkmont School, an independent non-traditional middle and high school in Washington, D.C. In 1995, she received the M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Gell Writers’ Center, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Agni, Black Bread, Best American Poetry, 1994 (A. R. Ammons, ed.), The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry (Clarence Major, ed.), and Callaloo. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina.