The Poem as Epiphyte
All this talk through a tunnel of kid gloves and landmines went underground. You were catching my limbs in sequels and spoofs, commemoration my organs with friends lost, whose names like patients’ names. Our clumped desire stirs and how when unwound, as with DNA, it sweetly wounds us. Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced or no hope at all. But I say, in my dreams I dream, in my dreams I do not hope. Where were you when was I? Counting down the decades for the prize as victim of our previous war. Were you my cactus heart and kelp forest, a gluttonous hunger I ate myself famished, an app, a tower or two, and flew as a swan flies into a sand file that said, “No more monkeys dead on the bed”? In my dreams the universe anneals for tents that fall like mamas from heaven. And you were tablet and me pill, surgery and me drone, firefly and me shooting star, where when my clone was made interminable no illness could. And the space between raindrops a shelter, the mountaintop a lake, the gecko an oriole, the athel a bulbul, and I was seagrass and you the banyan.
Originally published in the September 2018 issue of Words Without Borders. © 2018 by Fady Joudah. By arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.