Tuesday poem #589 : Asher Ghaffar : Algorithm

 

 

 

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