In Her Feminine Sign
Also by Dunya Mikhail
available from New Directions
The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq
The Iraqi Nights
Fifteen Iraqi Poets (editor)
Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea
The War Works Hard
Copyright © 2019 by Dunya Mikhail
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1454) in 2019
Book design and typesetting by Eileen Baumgartner
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mikhail, Dunya, 1965– author.
Title: In her feminine sign / Dunya Mikhail.
Other titles: Poems. Selections. English
Description: New York : New Directions, 2019. | “A New Directions paperbook original.” | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011201 | ISBN 9780811228763 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PJ7846.I392 A2 2019 | DDC 892.7/16—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011201
eISBN: 9780811228770
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
ndbooks.com
Contents
Author’s Note
The Tied Circle The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign
Song Inside a Fossil
Baghdad in Detroit
Plastic Death
Nisaba
Salwa
Eva Whose Shadow Is a Swan
Three Women
My Grandmother’s Grave
100 Years of Sleep
My Poem Will Not Save You
Tablets II
III
IV
V
T/here What We Carry to Mars
Ama-ar-gi
That Place
Black and White
The War in Colors
N ن
On the Edge of a Mass Grave
On Ground Zero
The Others
Drawing
Flamingo
Rotation
Notes
Acknowledgments
Landmarks
Cover
Author’s Note
I wrote these poems from right to left and from left to right, in Arabic and in English. I didn’t translate them; I only wrote them twice. Writing these poems in two languages maybe makes a new “original.” This process somehow liberated me from having to follow the first text, particularly when the second text came first, given the cultural connotation. To capture the poem in two lives is to mirror my exile, with all of its possibilities and risks. But as home is flashed through exile, a poem is sometimes born on the tip of another tongue.
It was annoying to me in the beginning when my poem pulled me right and left, but I always follow my poetry, just as people say to “follow your heart.” Well, to justify my choice, I would claim that allowing such a dialogue between the two texts is democratic, and even hopeful that East and West may meet in that crossing line between two languages. But this is not to say that I’ve achieved a linguistic utopia. To produce a text in two languages is to always hold a mirror to the first text while the mirror behaves as if that text is actually her mirror. The poet is at home in both texts, yet she remains a stranger. This English edition shows readers one side of the mirror.
The Tied Circle
The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign
Everything has gender
in Arabic:
History is male.
Fiction is female.
Dream is male.
Wish is female.
Feminine words are followed
by a circle with two dots over it.
They call this symbol “the tied circle,”
knotted with wishes
which come true only when forgotten
or replaced by the wishes of others.
In the town of tied wishes
people feel great anticipation
because a stranger will arrive
today in her feminine sign.
Someone says he saw her
two dots glittering,
refuting another’s vision
of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness.
So scary, he says, how the moon
hides in her red circle.
Everyone is busy today
listing wishes on pieces
of paper they’ll give to the wind.
When the stranger finds them
on her way, she’ll collect them
and adorn them to her circle,
tossing off some old wishes
to make space for the new.
They say the dropped ones
will come true.
The stranger’s lateness
worries those who wait.
Someone says she’s searching
for a word to complete
a special sentence,
the gift she’ll bring to town.
Another wonders if she seeks
a verb or a noun,
and offers to find her.
A third warns that the stranger
may turn him, with one touch,
into a flower that blooms
for only an instant
before it withers and dies,
her circle throbbing with songs
that cause sadness and elation
and something so obscure
no one has a name for it.
Will she complete a verb
or a noun phrase—or go solo,
a word complete on its own?
They wonder.
When they finally hear footsteps,
they know the stranger must be near.
Make sure the gate is open,
they remind one another.
They hear clinking—
A bracelet? A chain?
Song Inside a Fossil
She’s still looking
down at her baby
after 4,800 years.
Her fossil has the curve
of mothers telling
endless stories in the dark.
There were three birds
in the cage, she says.
Two died of poisoned water.
Though birds don’t know
what poison means,
the survivor has the memory
of thirst and of two silent birds.
If birds’ memories are circles, a line
must bisect them, tracing their migration
to places that are neither homelands nor exiles.
But what if the world, for birds,
is all exile, till they leave it behind?
The day her baby came into the world,
she carried water to him in her voice.
She
sung so close, he could hear
her heart beat like a bass drum.
He won’t remember the seeds
her words scatter, but won’t forget
the debris of what was shattered
from every wingbeat recalling her.
Birds don’t know
what coming to this world means,
but the bird who survived sings.
Is it an elegy for the two silent birds,
or a way of coming back to life?
Their circular embrace is
a song inside a fossil,
life in a cage.
Baghdad in Detroit
On the Fourth of July
here in Detroit
I hear the echo of Baghdad explosions.
They say it is the sound of fireworks.
Song by song
I scatter my birds
away from the fog of smoke.
They say it is ordinary clouds in the sky.
A butterfly from the Tigris shore
alights on my hand.
No bombs today to scare her away.
They say this is the Detroit River.
I enter a shelter
with the others in the crowd.
We will leave at the end of the raid.
They say this is the tunnel to Canada.
Plastic Death
In my childhood
in Baghdad
we played dead:
we killed each other
with plastic weapons.
We lay on the floor,
still as corpses
for a minute
or two.
Then one of us laughed,
exposing our plastic death;
we held each other
as the dying might
life itself, but rose
to play another game.
The years turn over
and Baghdad recedes
with our childhoods
into exile.
From afar, we see children
who look like we did.
They kill each other,
on the floor.
But none of them laugh
or hold life
and rise.
Nisaba
How shall I call you
when you have one hundred names?
I say Nisaba
and I mean praises for the little things,
I mean the big things, or rather
the little things with their big shadows:
the number to round off
the killed ones to zero
the chalk held by a girl
who draws for the world
a circle with everyone inside
the open wings
over the fires
the soft moss
briefly visible
through the river
like the faces of the absentees
the comma between
death and life
the everyday practice
of the doctor
with the stethoscope
pressed against a chest
the blue flower
in Novalis’s dream.
Salwa
She has no map,
only songs for places
she will cross and forget.
She hums in secret
and when words don’t come
she borrows the rhythm of the road,
fast and slow.
The birds understand.
They answer in secret, too.
She doesn’t care much
about transformations
between day and night
although she’s puzzled
and amazed by the moon,
how it passes her by
like a train disappearing
with its passengers
until it stops at the last station,
alone at last.
She waits for no one.
History is dried blood
in her lipstick.
She applies it now
to kill the moment
or beautify it a little.
She knows the time
from the way the roses bend,
from the farness or nearness of the sky,
from the dryness in her hands.
When she tires
of wandering,
she sits in the shade
and with her little stick,
she draws on the earth’s floor
the face of someone
she doesn’t know.
Eva Whose Shadow Is a Swan
The day we met in Babylon
for me to interpret her,
Eva found a pocket stone
she’d later add to her collection
of stones from different cities
she kept in a glass bowl.
We strolled roadsides
piled with rocks blasted
from bridges and buildings
now bent and cratered,
yet I like to think that stone
might have predated the fall of Babylon,
when people spoke one language.
I liked Eva’s musical tone.
She said, I am from Stockholm,
home to no war for two hundred years.
I am from Baghdad, I replied,
a city we call the “home of peace,”
though war has lived in it
for two hundred years.
We exchanged postcards
for thirty years before my East
and her West met in London,
our friendship needing
no umbrellas in the rain.
I waited for her impatiently
but hid on a whim behind a pillar,
admiring her poise
as she approached
and scanned the passersby,
like Noah in search of the Ark.
so beautiful,
her shadow a swan,
a goddess who found
her lost universe in the last minute.
She hiked an island mountain
on the way to our meeting
and bought a CD
of ferry music for me.
When I followed up
with a farewell call, I learned
she’d lost her hearing:
Write, so I can hear you.
She must have read my lips—
the concert we attended
in the rain must have seemed
like lightning without thunder.
When I receive her postcard,
I can’t read her handwriting
but plan to search the dictionary
of Babylon for her words
and decipher the line drawn by time.
Three Women
Another night on the way to the cages
and the stars—dead eggs glistening—
don’t know the secret of the stone.
For ten years the stone was left
in the basement with the three
kidnapped women inside it.
Their souls broke the door and escaped.
Their bodies lagged a few steps behind.
They will never look back.
If they do, they will find their feathers
scattered everywhere, and a bell
with no ring, and three shadows
trapped inside a stone.
My Grandmother’s Grave
&nbs
p; When my grandmother died
I thought, She can’t die again.
Everything in her life
happened once and forever:
her bed on our roof,
the battle of good and evil in her tales,
her black clothes,
her mourning for her daughter
killed by headaches,
the rosary beads and her murmur,
Forgive us our sins,
her empty vase from the Ottoman time,
her braid, each hair a history.
The Sumerians were first,
their dreams inscribed in clay tablets.
They drew palms, the dates
ripening before their sorrows.
They drew an eye to chase evil
away from their city.
They drew circles and prayed for them:
a drop of water
a sun
a moon
a wheel spinning faster than Earth.
They begged, O gods, don’t die and leave us alone.
Over the tower of Babel,
light is exile, blurred,
its codes crumbs of songs
leftover for the birds.
More naked emperors
passed by the Tigris
and more ships…
the river full
of crowns
helmets
books
dead fish,
and on the Euphrates
corpse-lilies float.
Every minute a new hole formed
in the body of the ship.
The clouds descended on us
war by war,
picked up our years,
our hanging gardens,
and flew away like storks.
We said nothing worse could come.
Then the barbarians arrived
at the mother of two springs.
They broke my grandmother’s grave—my clay tablet.
They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes
were wide open
sunflowers
watching the fragments of our first dreams
for a lifetime.
My hand brushes the map
as if rubbing an old scar.
100 Years of Sleep
I don’t want to be the princess.
I only want to be her sleep