We walk through clouds wrapped in ancient symbols We descend the hill wearing water Maybe we are dead and don’t know it Maybe we are violet flowers and those we long for love only our unmade hearts On attend, on attend Wait for Duras and Eminescu to tell us in French then Romanian light has wounds slow down— memory is misgivings Wait until the nails get rusty in the houses of our past.
Copyright © 2019 by Nathalie Handal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 3, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.