The street vendor offers tourists
necklaces with divided hearts,
seashells to murmur the sea’s secrets in your ear,
squishy balls to make you feel better,
maps of homelands you fold
in your pocket as you go on your way.
20
I am haunted by the melody
of a forgotten song
sung while two hands
tied my shoelaces into a ribbon
and waved me goodbye to school.
21
If I could photocopy
the moment we met
I would find it full
of all the days and nights.
22
It won’t forget the faraway child,
that city whose door stayed open
for passersby, tourists, and invaders.
23
The moon is going to the other
side of the world
to call my loved ones.
24
The seasons change
colors and you come and go.
What color is your departure?
T/here
What We Carry to Mars
This new tablet you carry contains text and images of what’s remembered from Earth. You saved your life in the cloud, and now you are traveling with it to Mars.
You can’t open a window on the way, to take a look at Mother Earth, not even a last look. Like any other mother, she will not stop spinning around the sun, though her residents never really feel her movement.
Mothers are circles with cracks. As Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Save that in the “Words as Vitamins for the Soul” file.
It doesn’t matter if you forget something; you may simply go to the cloud and download your memories. Sometimes you smile. I know, sometimes you want to forget.
We are all refugees. We move on, feeling that we’ve left something behind.
You don’t exactly know what you miss.
“Faraway” is a relative word. The theory of place we’ve been discussing for a lifetime will have another meaning over there.
Time will not be the same either. “I see you in a year of light” means “See you later.”
The hour will have no minutes. There will be just dust in a tube, and we can flip the tube over to see when we can return, just like this.
How many departures can you put up with?
“Are we safe there?” you wonder.
Are we safe here? Forget safety.
Here you have plants and no time to water them.
There you have time and no plants to water.
Here Earth has gravity so you don’t fly, and at the end you return to Mother Earth.
The Sumerians said “returning to the mother” when they meant “freedom.” See my poem “Ama-ar-gi” for further possibilities.
On Mars, where do they bury the dead?
There is less gravity there and thus enough to fly.
When you fly, cages become the last expectation.
T/here simple warmth, which is the difference between “living” and “alive.”
Mars looks like a half-baked cake.
No god yet to punish the sinners or console the sad ones.
The new planet is almost empty, but the word “empty” is relative too. The sky looks “empty” but it’s stuffed with stories we invented for the angels and devils. Our grandmothers, too, used to stuff our pillows with feathers and stories they had invented for us.
You are not sure where you should start from. So much war and so much love. You pack it all up and parachute to the new place like any immigrant with dreams and chimeras and dying stars.
A free dandelion, you are carried away in the wind, while in the background you hear “Songs from the Time of Earth” from someone’s tablet. Is it nostalgia or accident? You are not sure.
Ama-ar-gi
Scattered, like us, the Sumerian letters.
“Freedom” is inscribed
Ama-ar-gi, meaning
“returning to the mother.”
This, then, is how the map grew borders.
The birds don’t know it yet, leaving
their droppings wherever they want.
Their songs, like exiles, might pass by
anywhere. There are no borders
in paradise, neither spoils nor victors.
Paradise is Ama-ar-gi,
no victors at all.
There are no borders in hell,
no losses no demons.
Hell is Ama-ar-gi,
no demons at all.
Ama-ar-gi might be a moon
that follows us home, a shadow
that stumbles on its true self,
a bead from a bracelet,
a secret a tree keeps for centuries.
Maybe it’s what crowds the prisoner’s heart,
or what shines around the pebbles
mixed with drops of water
among the rocks, what seeps out
from the dead into our dreams.
Maybe it’s a flower thrown into the air
and hangs there alone,
a flower that will live and die without us.
Ama-ar-gi—
that’s how we return to the mother,
strangers from strangers.
And so like all of you,
we breathe Ama-ar-gi
and before we shed our first tears
Ama-ar-gi is what we weep.
That Place
I want that place
and you in it as always:
how you remember my flower
kept in the refrigerator.
I want that place
and I in it as always:
the candy moon we put
under our pillows
to dream of those who will love
us tomorrow.
I know the trees
in your garden and how they grow
quietly like grandmothers,
and how the gravity pulls light
into your hands.
Black and White
In chess,
white plays first
and black responds.
When a challenge happens,
killing offers the easiest solution.
The two players alternate
tossing wooden bodies into the box.
The pawns are the first to go.
A tie ends it:
everybody died,
except the black king and the white king,
separated by a borderline
and a memory of ruined castles.
The two kings are afraid
of losing one another.
The problem is how to meet
without a checkmate.
Love offers the hardest solution.
The rules of the game dictate
that sharing a square
equals death for one
and keeping their distance
means death for them both.
To leave the board
for a life the color
of water, a play
no less risky
than running after a bubble:
you lose it once you touch it.
The War in Colors
The digital map on the wall
displays American wars
in colors:
Iraq in purple
Syria in yellow
Kuwait in blue
Afghanistan in red
Vietnam in green.
The war
on the map
is beautiful.
N ن
The “N” on the doors,
an exodus
from houses:
no keys
no compass
no words.
Wide clothes
cover tightened souls.
Lights tremble
in the lanterns.
How heavy the carriage is!
It carries the skies
on their shoulders,
along with their sorrows,
the phantoms of those
taken aside,
and the last looks.
It carries the newborn
startled from the shake
of the wheels.
It carries a schoolbag
with the colorful wars
in a history book,
the atlas made of what is
remembered,
the math book and its questions
multiplying like the weight
of the carriage.
The moon doesn’t reflect
what is carried
or left behind.
Like them, it’s waning.
The “N” on the doors
is a rainbow
drained of color
and the dot above
it is a lonely god.
Tomorrow the Earth will turn
with their fields,
with early fallen leaves
as if shaken off by the trees.
The Earth will turn
with their shops full of timepieces,
antiques, and suitcases;
the dust will fall off
their ancient stuff,
but something they can’t fix
will land on their chests
like a sunset.
Tomorrow they will gather
what remains:
mud stuck on their shoes,
kite sticks,
safety pins, and buttons,
a distant star in the dark.
Tomorrow they will
make a country
from the straw
and from whatever else remains.
The “N”
is a lap
in the mountain.
Every grain a bell
relentlessly ringing.
Where will the ringing carry them?
How many will survive
to return someday
and see the pictures
of the dead on the walls?
How many girls will outgrow
their dresses
while on the road?
Countries grow smaller
behind the backs
of the departing ones.
The “N”
and the pen
and the footsteps
and the late sun
and their crumpled shadows
on the walls of the cave.
Sisyphus, exhausted,
left his rock for us,
and when my turn came
I paused
to ask about my father.
Did he emerge from the whale?
Did he leave his bed when he was sick?
Did he die from thirst?
The rock opened its mouth:
I didn’t see your father
for twenty years . . . and who are you?
I am the child who ran
to seek the ones who hid—
she screamed for them to come out
or else she would quit the game.
I am the stranger who forgot
to put out the fire
and now, having returned
to collect the scattered feathers
in the ash, suddenly sees
her own wrinkles in the map.
I am the village on the hillside.
They left my doors open
and left. They didn’t
tie their shoelaces.
No doughs rise in the ovens
this evening.
No
one
is here
under
the sun.
Nuun
Nuuna
Nye
Nye for little Mariam.
She made sandals
from tree leaves
to wear
in the caravan.
Nye for Khudayda.
He didn’t bury his family.
Frozen and tearful—a half-melted glacier
and their photos in his hands.
Nye for the child.
They don’t know his name
or where his parents are.
His quiet gaze, a flash
of lightning in the eyelids.
Nye for the mother.
Which child to save first?
She sang
the same lullaby
to each of them.
Nye for our people.
They fell before
their fruits could fall,
and the grass grows
around their sleep
without memory
as it grows
elsewhere.
On the Edge of a Mass Grave
He sleeps on his side,
as usual, except his bones
are visible—
you can even count them.
Surrounded by friends,
as usual, except they’re dead.
He’s completely calm
and doesn’t worry about his wounds.
The sun slips through the clouds
above the mass grave
it brightens death.
They are close to each other
like conjoined trees
on which they would rest their backs
except now they have no words.
The Others
We are not dead,
and those are not our ghosts.
We don’t know where they came from,
or where they are going.
Their shadows are as changeable
as the moon’s phases
and are not our shapes.
Their jinns floating over the waters
are not our wars.
Their hollows are not our cracks
on the walls. In our sleep,
they melt into one gesture.
What do they want to say?
And why—every night,
in view of the stars—do they dig
a hole for someone whose turn has come?
They call on us,
and we are in the middle of the river.
They carry their perforated jars.
We count the holes,
and they count our memories.
To catch their fears
we set fires. To imitate us
they light up our darkness.
We will abandon them, we say,
and they will slip away like a passing idea,
beam of light
that doesn’t know where to fall.
We pretend it’s not dry yet,
the life we left
on the string,
and go and look for their voices.
Like them we hide.
Between one dream and another,
we hear their wooden steps.
We call on them
and they are in the middle
of the river.
Drawing
She called him “Riv
er”
and herself “Fish.”
One day she sent him
a drawing of a fish on land
and a river with an “X” across it.
He shriveled up quickly
at this separation, worrying
if she meant
he was dead to her, or if
she meant she was dead
without him.
Flamingo
I read that flamingoes
have migrated back to Iraq
after a twenty-year absence,
and I bend my head,
imitating the perfect,
half-hearted Valentine
shape they make in pairs.
I wait for you
at the lake’s edge
standing on one leg.
The moon I swallow
when I open my beak
and fly home to you
will be full.
Rotation
I don’t feel the rotation of the Earth,
not even when I see
the cities moving backward
through the train’s window,
one by one.
Not even when I return
each time to the same place
where birds pick up the mornings
with their beaks and spread them away
as new circles of light.
Not even when I sleep
and see you alive in my dream
and then wake knowing the dead
didn’t rise yet from their death.
Not even when I find myself
saying the same thing over and over
as if those words were oars
cutting through a river
we cross in turns
with our untold stories
to that same shore, in silence.
Notes
p. 11The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign: In Arabic, there’s a feminine symbol (a circle with two dots above it that appears at the end of the word) used to transform a masculine word into a feminine one.
p. 13Song Inside a Fossil: In 2016, archaeologists in Taiwan uncovered the ancient remains of a young mother cradling an infant child in a 4,800-year-old embrace.
p. 17Nisaba: The Sumerian goddess of writing.
p. 23Three Women: This poem was written in 2013, after the story broke about a man who had imprisoned three women in his basement in Cleveland, Ohio for nearly a decade, using them as sex slaves.
p. 29Tablets: The first section of “Tablets”—my attempt to write Iraqi haiku—can be found in The Iraqi Nights. The Sumerian clay tablets come down to us as the earliest recorded communication in history. I tried to imitate those ancient symbols with the drawings that accompany the poems.