Dialectics
Now that we have an alphabet
and leisure and the evening
is congealing into a plausible shape,
you can write the names of everyone
you love without contradiction
in webs of sugar
and no one would know.
Promises are pooling
round our ankles, greener,
they are pearling, born of needing
more to say.
Smoke and rapid water. O
but truth is an arena
where people get hurt.
(And on it goes.)
Used with the permission of the author.
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.