How to Pray While the World Burns

We present this work in honor of Yom Ha-atzmaut.

Go outside.
Find a patch of grass, sand, dirt.
Sit, kneel, place a hand or just
A finger to the soft earth.
Feel it pulse back.

Open your palms and divine
The words creased between.
Rub the specks of dirt
Between your fingers,
See how they cling to skin,
How they listen in their soft-rough way.

The earth will hold you better
Than God can.
God could not stop the bullets
Or the sale of weapons.
God could not block the open
Synagogue doors.

But we keep saying, Shema,
Listen.
Israel.
Our God is One.
Singular.
Invisible.
Hiding in plain sight.

But listen, Israel, our God is beneath
Our feet, between
Our fingers, coursing
Through our veins.

Our God is trapped
In the poisoned grass,
Where the blood of our brothers cries out,
Where the ants heave centuries on their backs.

Pray to the God who sharpened the tiger’s teeth,
Who stored the roar in its throat.
Pray to the God who gave you lungs and tongue
To sing and groan and hum.

I swear to you
When the leaf shivers in the wind
You have given it chills
From all its listening.

The earth hears your prayer.
There is nowhere for God to hide.
Get down on your knees and let
This precious earth soften for the weight of you.

You are held.
You are heard.
The wind pulls its blanket over your back,
Smooths the hair from your face,
Touches your cheek
With its cool, trembling hands.

The Charm of Spring

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 50th birthday.

I passed in a garden
with the gaits of the wind.
I saw the owner of garden
with the art of love
in the look of a rose.
The branches of all the
trees were ornamented with
the blossom of the apple.
Bravo, the art of the charm
of the spring. The green
velvet of the grass has
spread its skirt for seeing
the munificence in the
hearts of my companions.
Flowing with the joy, a pond
in the garden took the fishes
that song the love melodies to
the abode of dream. Bravo, the
art of the charm of the spring.

I heard the joy of love in
the clamour of hundred
swallows. Then I saw the
feast of the trees that had
the branches ornamented
with the blossoms of love.
They song together the
melody of unity: bravo
the art of the charm of
the spring.

It Grows

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 65th birthday.

The dream grows
you have become a tree
Honey drips from the branches.

The silence grows
the poem is the night
that gives you a portal.

The rain grows
I barely get wet
inside your body.

The light grows
you are his reflection
on my dress.

Breathing increases
and we turn around naked
in the shadow.

Crossing

Driving across town
she feels plain
and botanical.

At a crossing
there’s a man
with a cake, girl
with a tune.
Four young people
wheel a bed,
headed for a house
where a young woman
might read, love a man/some
men, might hold their bodies
close and welcome some parts
of those bodies
into hers.

Years later
she might see these men
in suits and on television and
many years later
might pass one, a house painter,
as she drives to buy
paint, for heaven’s sake.

Now, nearing sixty,
this woman loves her husband
ferociously.
When she turns the compost
and finds the flat wrinkled body
of a mouse,
she remembers the time
he rang her in Scotland
to say he’d seen one in the pile
and what should he do?

She shovels the remains
of the mouse with the rest
of the compost to beneath
the blossom, which bows
low and graceful over neglect,
which abounds, as it does,
wonderfully, in the garden of the
southern house they move to
for a time.

He’s up to his ears
in sadness, both of them aghast
at landscape. Being asthmatic
he is immediately attractive
to animals – at the lake
a fox terrier pup takes shelter
under his chest as he lies down
on a towel after a swim.
In the kitchen a mouse
bumps into his foot. Drama
in the house! Not for the first
time. These were rooms
of costume, scenery,
leading ladies and men
on the front terrace, leaning
on architect Ernst Plischke’s rail,
stone warm underfoot, snowed
mountains as backdrop
while the deep, broad river passed
below them, always
on its way.

Absurd

Soon…
Very soon, my friend…
We will discover that all the optimists
Are insane more than any absurdity.
In your dreams… just as in every morning…
You arrange your dreams
Like precious furniture devices;
A bramble vase here…
A velvet, dull sofa there…
Some fingers missing around.
Oh, Farida!
Did you have to take the flowers out of the window?
Sprinkle the salt all over the place?
This heart cannot anymore grumble…
The basil in my mother’s garden just withered.
Outside the bells toll…
For another last Last Supper.
You arrange your dreams… Again
Here… There. Again
It is the wandering spirit
Since the blooming of first spring flowers

learning

when will we live like that again?
first there was a city with its moons and cars
lawless comets and such discontinuous delight
that even going for a walk around the galaxy
was icecream in the park, sweet momentum
like a scattering of stars arriving to read
the book of tears to a crowd expecting opera
what next but the caduceus, dazed
imperatives wrapped about a talking stick
face to face and turn by turn reared back
to flap the wings of vision overhead after this
the lily with its open mouth and ribbon spathes
bumpy erogeny bespeaking
the immaculate shape of things to come

Taking Shape

We present this work in honor of the Tunisian holiday, Martyrs’ Day.

Time: Circles intertwine
to form
one circle:
Its fulcrum is
your betrayal.
The rays of lies stretch
like a diameter of blunders.
In mathematics
there is something called ‘adjacency’—
a no man’s land zone:
We are not inside it, nor outside of it.
We sometimes meet in it
or at the edge of the circle/the memory.
Thus, we belong to all possibilities.
When meeting,
the circle vehemently revolves
to return into
a mere dot
in the void

Translation by Ali Znaidi

Noah and the Ark

Find me an orchestra of elephant tusk horns
bulrongs and drums
I must have
instruments of hair and string
for last night I had a vision of a two-
winged symphony O let us
sing our longing to the heavens
and grieving, they will bear us to forever
where our clothes are not so dull We
will be made of purple
flowers there it is always
spring There there are no kings.
How much longer must we ring
this blue bubble of unbroken bitter-
leaf soup drinking
where pain is measured
in depths of laughter but laughter
often hides
regret of salt?
I will build a house that swims
a fish to net the world-
a place to warble duets
when the big rains come.

The Last Supper of Judas Iscariot

We present this work in honor of Good Friday.

Judas was right
to wait until after dessert.
If only for the Savior of Mankind
to finish his coffee and pie.

He knew his Master
would not be happy
about any of it.

While his dimwit brothers,
shared a glass of Port,
He, whose name would
be called betrayer, said
He would pass, thanks.

Judas was right, but
He hated long goodbyes.
I’ll see you in the garden, later.
There’s a guy in town
who owes me money.

The Lord spoke:
I’ve got a long day tomorrow.
How about one more joke,
And we’ll call it a night.

Then he leaned onto
his elbows and he asked,
Did you hear the one
about the guy, who thinks
he’s seen a ghost?

from The Athanor

We present this work in honor of Tunisian Independence Day.

A mask left me stranded at the beginnings of the world
and my delible ashes for a long while swirled
in the depths of Punic Tophets.
And my powerless breath wore itself out, for a long time
at the pediments of Roman glory.
O my lifeblood, my Numidian vigor.
There has always been roaming, always the wind,
And the exultation of sands as vain armies of crystal.
And the damp shelter of hillside caves in the steppes of exile.
And bare tufts, always there, in the hollow of a summer brought forth.
Always, always, the tenacious, fragile dream
of a riverbank where to land is to be reborn
naked, reconciled,
and living
at the pace of swaying palm trees.

Translation by Patrick Williamson

Poets Corner

Celebrating a world of written and spoken verse

21st Century Poems