Agitated Air [Months pass. A year. You’re here still]
Months pass. A year. You’re here still
haunting what we had, scratching
the phantom limb. Again’s not
some retrievable rush, it’s what
you can hope for: revolution
or another poem. The staircase
home’s a tragic shape.
All we can do is spiral,
describe the loops and watch
the epicentre dim.
What’s left? A bowl of vapour.
Questions. Lights. A love that made you
see things.
From Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022) by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger. Copyright © 2022 by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger. Used with the permission of the authors.
Yasmine Seale
Yasmine Seale, a writer, translator, printmaker, and artist, was born in London in 1989.
Among Seale’s translations from Arabic are Something Evergreen Called Life (Action Books, 2022), a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun, and The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021), described by The New Yorker as “an electric new translation.” Seale is the coauthor of Agitated Air (Tenement Press, 2022), a collaboration with the translator Robin Moger, responding to the work of the poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi.