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Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)

1942 –

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day,

aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day.

I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names

of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day,

while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around

the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day.

A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade,

while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day.

Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚—

another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day.

One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales

that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day.

But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight

on a minuscule screen , and exclaim يا لطيف every day.

Born in New York City on November 27, 1942, Marilyn Hacker was the only child of a working-class Jewish couple, each the first in their families to attend college. Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science before enrolling at New York University, where she received a BA in Romance languages in 1964.

Themes

About this Poem

“I’m very fond of the ghazal form, because of its combination of unity—the qafia (rhyme) and radif (repeated word or phrase) are a ‘fixed’ element, while the couplets themselves can go off in any direction. Usually the poet includes their name, or a version of it, in the last couplet. I also love the ghazal because of other poets who practice it: Agha Shahid Ali, Zeina Hashem Beck, Mimi Khalvati, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Suzanne Gardinier, Karthika Nair, among them. An American critic wrote, perhaps misinformed, that that last couplet was meant to include one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam. ‘Lateef’—the kind or gentle one—is one of those names, but ‘Ya Lateef’ is a common exclamation, equivalent to ‘Good God!’ (in exasperation), or even ‘Oi veh is mir…’ Today, there is an overwhelming reason to say a collective and worldwide ‘Ya lateef,’ while the oligarchs golf in their compounds, for as long as they still can.”

—Marilyn Hacker

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More by this poet

Montpeyroux Sonnets 7

^{For Julie Fay}

Tired of asparagus and aubergines,
tired of tomatoes, even tired of wine,
tired of the village in its niche between
the Causses and the Mediterranean,
she stays in bed, the window blanked, till noon,
then lights a cigarette, emerges from
the sunken twenty-three hours’ dark bedroom

Marilyn Hacker

2024

Ghazal: The Dark Times

Tell us that line again, the thing about the dark times…
“When the dark times come, we will sing about the dark times.”

They’ll always be wrong about peace when they’re wrong about justice…
Were you wrong, were you right, insisting about the dark times?

The traditional fears, the habitual tropes of exclusion
Like ominous menhirs, close into their ring about the dark times.

Naysayers in sequins or tweeds, libertine or ascetic

Marilyn Hacker

2017

Interval

Attention fraying
in late afternoon light, soon
day will be done, not

the work incumbent on it
—whatever that might have been—

Gnarls of an old text
in the other alphabet:
can I unknot them,

reweave mirror fabric of
liminal unravelings?

Liminal space where
exiles with dictionaries
lose themselves: barzakh,

Arabic isthmus, the span
from death to resurrection

in Farsi: limbo,
where Socrates murmurs to
unbaptized babies

in contrapuntal cognates,
they hear fardous, paradise.

Marilyn Hacker

2016

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Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)

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