Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Like Jude the Obscure,
you wait beneath the vaulting
of a corridor
where you never belonged and
nothing here belongs to you.
How sallow your skin,
how outmoded your clothing,
how crumpled your face,
while multi-ethnic students
stroll past, bright-caparisoned.
**
How bright the past looks,
when that was being forty,
free, in an airport
on some Adonic journey
or in a more recent year
believing in the
revolution you kissed her,
kissed him away to—
Kafranbel’s Friday demo
recounted to you in French.
**
The French woman who
can’t go back to Damascus
shouted at her friend
the activist refugee:
The Kurds were right to keep out!
Now it’s civil war!
The two Kurds – one’s her husband—
said nothing. Around
us on the lawn, families
heard Arabic, and wondered.
**
I wonder about
my friend in Jerusalem.
Imru al-Qays is
his muse, if you will, and he
translates Palestinians.
A scholar my age,
protests what former exiles
inflict on exiles,
but why that street, that hill, in
all the diasporic world ?
**
Diasporic grave,
narrow as a ploughed furrow,
elbowed in on both sides
by riverains of Montreuil
who lived and died there, while she
was housed there by chance:
political refugee’s
right to a lodging –
accidental neighbourhood,
now her accidental tomb.
**
Tadmor tomb portraits,
the person’s name and “Alas”
beside his, her face
in the little museum
in Hamra, empty today:
brother and sister,
a distraught-looking lady,
a husband and wife,
Palmyra, empty today.
Khaled al-Asa’ad: Alas.
**
Antigone was
a role for her, and I know
she played the part
in Arabic, as I saw
it played in Saint-Denis by
Palestinian
actors. In Damascus, she
was in a theatre.
Then they were outside, the stage
built in haste, the words her own.
**
There was a word I
didn’t know in your letter,
almost a friend’s name,
one character different . I
looked it up, and it means death.
May Skaf who tied back
her wild silver-tinged hair to
speak at Fadwa’s grave
is gone, forty-nine, no one
quite knows how, why. Some love kills.
**
Some lovely useless
ubiquitous foreign word ,
bougainvillea
blooming well into July,
framing blue vistas of sea.
An orange cat walks
by. There are hundreds, not strays
but the descendants
of civil war survivors
abandoned in this barzakh.
**
Stacked in abandon
of any order but what
might catch the eye, books
you now imagine reading,
al-Jahiz and al-Ma’ari
and here, this woman
an essay revealed to you,
dead too soon, poems
a dictionary lights up
as you probe among the roots.
**
If Abiah Root
had kept writing letters to
her friend Emily
after she moved to Beirut,
and if Emily wrote back…
Amherst to Beirut –
birds of imagination
circle the Corniche,
invisible ink quatrains:
where, with them, would harbour be?
Poems should not need footnotes, but Khaled al-Asa’ad was the 83-year-old Syrian archaeologist who had worked all his life on the translations of the tablets of Ur at Palmyra/Tadmor, and was still working at this when he was beheaded by Da’esh at the site in August of 2015, and his body exhibited on the public square.
“Some love kills” من الحبِّ ما قتل is an Arabic proverb.
Abiah Root was a girlhood friend of Emily Dickinson when Dickinson was briefly sent to boarding school at what is now Mount Holyoke College. They corresponded after Emily returned to Amherst. In her twenties, Abiah married the Reverend Daniel Bliss, and went with him to Lebanon, then “Greater Syria,” where he founded what was first called the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, and remained at its head till 1902. It is now the American University of Beirut.