House
by Salma Amrou
in my mother tongue, a couplet is called a bayt
and in my father’s, a fool builds a bayt
while a wise man lives in it. the salesman from the roof repair
company knocks on the door, asking for the man of the bayt
to discuss replacing our shingles, curling up at the edges like fingers
cupped in hushed supplication. My Lord, build me a bayt,
in Heaven, pleaded the wife of Pharaoh, and save me from my husband.
how many walls have heard the same prayer seep through the cracks of a bayt
unbuilt, mounds of sand on the roof, in our village back home? as a girl
I would bake mud pies out of my father’s dreams of a final return to a bayt
in the homeland–like one in Heaven–entered after a long, toiling life.
my father pulls drapes over windows, so while we’re gone, the eyes of the bayt
no longer peer out onto the farmland, onto Jesus the carpenter’s
shop next door, hammering furniture for the bayt
of another couple, soon to be wed–furnishing their first small
apartment, card deck transformed into the foundations of a bayt
by their realtor, who is a poet, or a soothsayer–rambling on about the beauty
of bare bones and yellowed walls, cracking the door to a ghazal’s opening bayt
that I return to, on a journey every summer and winter with a caravan
flanking me, Quraish worshipping the Lord of the bayt
who fed their hunger and secured them from fear. fatherhood
looks like godhood in churches and beneath the dim light of a bayt
while daughterhood looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moses turned prophet
for another God, when Pharoah turned father too late. this is the bayt
of poetry: with my tongue, I stone him from inside my own glass bayt
expiating the unexpiated–even in his pilgrimage to God’s bayt.