GHAZAL: ARABIC |

GHAZAL: ARABIC

For Agha Shahid Ali

Their roots untwined, the verbs unwind in Arabic
The poem scrolls down with its rhyme defined in Arabic.

One little vowel, the doer is the done-by:
Betrayals can be more refined in Arabic.

Here are a dozen words I could read yesterday –
If my mind goes blank, have I lost my mind in Arabic?

A velvet shadow on a declaration,
A metaphor that was left behind in Arabic.

Have I illusions of recovered youth,
My eyes unblurred and my cheeks unlined in Arabic?

Write in the language spoken by the neighbors –
Linguistics of the double bind in Arabic.

The Syrian lady from Cairo described rare books
In Achrafyieh, as we dined, in Arabic.

What did the olive tree say to the bulldozer ?
An exercise I was assigned in Arabic.

The little exile opens a third-hand reader
Whose politics are unaligned in Arabic.

I wrote a page. The title was in French,
The text in English. It was signed in Arabic.

(first published in PNReview)