Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)
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.
Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Hacker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
Marilyn Hacker
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.