I peer through the fence
at my grandfather’s olive trees.
Look through the water
of my eyes into your iron-clad heart.
Let me walk to my home
before the
acrid smoke entered
convolutions. Let me walk
to my room
where my husband lies wanting.
Before the ammunition rained
through the ambulances’ drone.
In these empty
streets
woven by
incertitude, I remember him
through my child
so that when I vanish
he can almost
touch me
through this dusk—a
bridge between
two absences that
blossom.
Let me unclench his hand
with loaded pistol.
Take the hand of my child –
change his name.
Let me wash and perfume
my husband’s body with camphor,
while you turn over the earth in your fury.
II
From the floating pier that never arrives,
canned food falls from the sky.
Every direction leads to a trench
from a pier that never arrives.
Let me wrap my child in white cloth
by the floating pier that never lies.
I know a yearning in every cell and atom
of my being for freedom.
You steal my cup with iron clad grip;
pass it to your loved ones and drink his blood.
Build castles on our land.
A moat around them like Ferdinand
and Isabella.
Dreaming is a wall.
I cannot smell coffee brewing here,
in Beirut, in the sea
or in memory.
III
Sealing off our lives
with algorithms of killing, you remember
barking dogs, screams,
being herded like cattle—
the disabled, the sick, the mute—
discarded
with torn suitcases and boxes?
Protests on your side
of the world wane
where it seems most safe,
where you dream but fail
to speak.
Asher Ghaffar is a poet who works and writes in Toronto. He is the author of Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music (ECW Press, 2009), and is currently working on a second collection called SS Komagata Maru that was nominated for the K.M Hunter Award in Literature.
the
Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
No comments:
Post a Comment