Ghost (or: Anatta 1)
You keep disappearing
then coming back again.
And your name, too, keeps
slipping, slipping: Spirit? Ghost?
They call you Sunyata,
but the name means nothing, absolutely
nothing, and I do not understand.
“There’s a limit to mind,” you say,
“a limit to matter—go past it,
then you’ll see.”
But what goes past, my friend?
And who is it
who does the seeing then?
Copyright © 2016 by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. This poem was first printed in Life and Legends: Journal of International Literature. July 1, 2016. Used with the permission of the author.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Kareem James Abu-Zeid is the translator of No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems 2014 – 2024 by Najwan Darwish (Yale Margellos, 2024). The recipient of awards, fellowships, honors, and residencies from PEN America, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry magazine, the Fulbright Program, the Lannan Foundation, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, he lives outside of Santa Fe.