At Kiasma Café, Helsinki
is a dream of the fields once
green. The taste of the earth
sleeping under the bottom
of seven seas
the sun sleeps, crackles, opens
deep, deep within the clay ovens
that gaze at the curse of stars
married to the haze of charcoal smoke
the soft-white shape is summer
turning bronze, the sugar melting
the salt rising on the shores
of anecdotes the sin still sits on the tongue
that prophets once pardoned—
the glassy domes of yeast murmur
prayers your mother once left
on your face it records the sunrises
hanging at the edge of a knife
the courtyards lined with jasmine
celebrate the smell,
the wisdom left by grains
which watches
the earth hinged on its axis
sideways—its body a sandalwood casket
buried in Bactria with
deciduous forests, kewra gardens
the gold of rye and wheat. Angels
knead it all into a disc large enough
to feed the caravan of the dead
who pity on our lives, understand
the courage of the corn with its eye
open, the golden milk within. It listens
to the hubbub in bazaars, the seeds
hardening on copper crusts with the sound
of Sur-e-Israfil: the curse of lips. Each second
divides the clay that tries to rise
with the white lump in the oven:
hungry for the coal inside pits.
The empty sky will fill
the husks in its belly
before it falls like
breadcrumbs over pits of fire
where children sleep in their dreams
there is no green, only the sweet smell
of bread, the wrinkled figs: wet, old
faces, wiping that extra shaft
of dusk with the long bell sleeves
hennaed fingers shape the white mounds
into moon discs
all this behind peach sunlight
a curtain, a burden forgotten
in bits, dark pits
the sorcery of flour and fire.
[Excerpted from ‘Sin of Semantics’]
← Saima Afreen