I see beacons throughout Abdurraqib’s poetry. If music can stabilise the mysteries of feeling into language, then Abdurraqib completes the circle. He takes all that mystery and emotion given voice in music, and attributes a language to that language.

In ‘This Vast Conspiracy of Memory,’ Khalid Warsame writes: ‘The most unstable thing I can think of is time: where does the past go? It’s there, I can feel the ghost of it, and I can even see its effects on both my body and the world around me, but how do I place that which slips out of my grasp continuously’ (par. 13.) This is a perennial wonder and frustration for me too. The only way I’ve managed to reckon with these ghosts is to wrap myself around music so tightly that music becomes memory. Sridala Swami conveys this desire to hold onto memory by fusing it with music in her poem ‘All Music is Memory,’ which ends with the lines: ‘A million years are lost / and I try in vain to cup my hands / and hold a note, a scale, a song’ (324). Swami writes of trying to preserve an ancestral past in music. She seems plaintive about music’s ephemeral nature, as it slips through her cupped hands. But when I hold music, I hold my own – if not a collective – past. And when I listen to that music years later, that past feels realer than ghosts.

I’m listening to Veckatimest’s final track, ‘Foreground,’ and a fragmented memory has returned to me; it’s one that wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been imprinted into the song. I’m on a bus careering across a causeway in Jaffna, looking out into the sea one moment and then across a desert the next. I know this can’t be true, but memory is a convincing storyteller. Listening to the song on that bus, I knew I was enveloping the scene with feeling. I was sealing it as memory, to meet it sometime in the future, as poetry.