AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "WHY WHALES ARE BACK IN NEW YORK CITY" BY CARIBBEAN AMERICAN POET RAJIV MOHABIR



RAJIV MOHABIR is an award-winning queer poet, memoirist, and translator. Born in London, England, to Indo-Guyanese parents, he grew up in New York City and Florida’s Greater Orlando Area. He holds a BA from the University of Florida in Religious Studies (1999-2005), a Master’s Degree in Education in TESOL from Long Island University of Brooklyn, New York (2006-2008), and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College of the City University of New York (2009-2013). He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i (2013-2017). He is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.


Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry:

  • Seabeast (forthcoming September 15, 2025)
  • Whale Aria (2023), received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Forward Indies, Bronze Medal from the Northern California Publishers and Authors, and finalist/Honorable Mention from the Eric Hoffer Award
  • Cutlish (2021), longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, awarded the Silver Medal from the Northern California Publishers and Authors, and finalist for the New England Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Award and the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award. Awarded second place in the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature.
  • The Cowherd’s Son (2017), winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize and Honorable Mention from the Eric Hoffer Award
  • The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016), finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry


Mohabir was also awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets and a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (2019), originally published in 1916.


His memoir Antiman (2021) – a vulgar term in the Caribbean for a male homosexual – received a Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Adult Nonfiction and was finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Nonfiction, The Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and the 2022 PEN Open Book Award. It was a finalist for the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature.


Learn more about Rajiv Mohabir at his official website

https://www.rajivmohabir.com/

Photo Credit: Profile on Website of the University of Colorado Boulder https://experts.colorado.edu/display/fisid_173865




POEM "WHY WHALES ARE BACK IN NEW YORK CITY" BY RAJIV MOHABIR



After a century, humpbacks migrate

again to Queens. They left

due to sewage and white froth


banking the shores from polychlorinated-

biphenyl-dumping into the Hudson

and winnowing menhaden schools.


But now grace, bodies of song

return. Go to the seaside—


Hold your breath. Submerge.

A black fluke silhouetted

against the Manhattan skyline.


Now ICE beats doors

down on Liberty Avenue

to deport. I sit alone on orange





POEM "WHY WHALES ARE BACK IN NEW YORK CITY" continued



A train seats, mouth sparkling

from Singh's Roti Shop, no matter how

white supremacy gathers


at the sidewalks, flows down

the streets, we still beat our drums

wild. Watch their false-god statues


prostrate to black and brown hands.

They won't keep us out

though they send us back.


Our songs will pierce the dark

fathoms. Behold the miracle:


what was once lost

now leaps before you.


SOURCE: Whale Aria: Poems by Rajiv Mohabir, published

by Four Way Books, New York, USA, 2023, pp. 97-98.