Life Spans
I loved my grandmother,
But she devoted herself to the family.
I loved my mother,
But she devoted herself to my father.
I loved my father,
But he devoted himself to the war.
Me
Dawn hurts me.
Morning hurts me.
Afternoon hurts me.
Even night hurts me…and I say nothing.
Just a Question
Why do–
Whenever I open my window
On your smile–
You exude disappointment
Like a poem by Faleeha Hassan?
What Interests Me
I know there are men more tender than you
With eyes more protective than yours,
And more other things,
And . . . . . . .
But I’m not interested in the number of hydrogen bonds in molecules of water.
All I know is that without water, I’ll die of thirst
And I’m the same
Without you.
Letters Obviously Not Intended for Anyone Else
He said, “I love…”
And fell silent,
As if “you”
Were a word best left unspoken.
Another Question
How can I eulogize myself for you
Once I am dead?
Isn’t it enough that out of me you produce another me,
From you another you,
And from us other people?
Isn’t it enough
That the sky isn’t big enough for all the stars,
When we’re together?
Stalingrad
During moments I yearned for forests grown for me alone,
Caressing them in a dream,
I could sense the throbbing of the heart
Hidden beneath my ribs to bless my journey.
Summoning me with a pulse that he recognizes in me.
I heard the noise of abandoned smoke from a moment of care
Join with me,
Forcefully traversing desires to the hidden-most one.
My spirit swung toward him,
Creating a tingling
On lips that devour breaths alive.
I felt ashamed,
But the eye,
In moments–I scarcely know what to call them–that took me on another route
Toward the television, saw warplanes…spray death on them.
At that moment,
The fire of machine guns raked all the bodies,
And another fire raked my body when I trained my eye on him
Hesitantly inclining his head
Toward a shoulder unaccustomed to the secret of the stars of war
Or to insomnia.
Oh…I leaned on it!
And when he caressed a dumbfounded person
I felt his fingers like coiling embers inside me.
Bashfulness seized the excuse this caress gave…and vanished,
Eliminating distance till the two of us were one.
And the eye–he moaned: May love not forgive her the eye–repeated another evasion
Toward a drizzle of men flung about in the air by just the rustling of a pilot penetrating a building
To fall on screens as the debris of breaking news.
But his breaths…shattering the still down of the cheek,
And turning their picture into mist as
Eddies of the screen’s corpses…varieties of death that they brought them.
The spirit that became a body,
The body that was sold for the sake of a touch,
The eye that was concealed in his image
And that approached the firebrand of conflagrations.
Everyone drawing close to everyone,
Everyone,
Everyone,
Everyone.
But the thunder of their machine guns splintered them:
Corpses piled on corpses,
I mean on me,
The eyes of those in it were extinguished.
They slept in a trench of silence.
My eyes’ lids parted in a wakefulness obsessed with them.
I rose…and embraced the chill
That the screens brought me in commemoration of Stalingrad.