Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
She called you “My lovely,” as you writhed, dying
in atrocious pain that the morphine top-ups
eased for half an hour, and I thought of Tadmor
where you had comrades,
but the Darwish lines I memorized with you
where a mother sings for her martyr’s wedding
weren’t where I wanted them, on my tongue, if
words could have reached you.
It’s too easy to costume you as Zainab
led in chains to Damascene exile (you were
Damascene by adoption, missed the city
more than Lattakié).
Exile, first your refuge, became your torture
as the months passed, added up years, a window
fogged with possibilities gone nostalgic
despite your fierceness…
so you chain-smoked, as you harangued who’d listen
on the public squares, in a foreign language,
or spoke softly, friend at a café table
writing your own roles.
How his face, or hers, changed as you evoked it,
wiping dust and steam from a winter window,
the beloved, nameless beyond erasure,
multiple, murdered.
You became your distances, grew your hair long.
Eyes dark-circled, books stacked on shelves behind you,
you said, pale, three times, in dialect: I’m a
refugee, لاجئة
First published in The New Humanist