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Days been dark
don’t say “in these dark days”
done changed my cones and rods
Sometimes I’m the country
other times the countryside
I put my clothes back on
to take them off again
Copyright © 2017 by Fady Joudah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 17, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Still they ask in podcast
and electronic ink: How are you doing?
And they keep you in their hearts, pump you
to their minds, circulate you unimagined.
Take all the space you need, they say,
empathy loves the damaged.
“If you were a star,” you said, “you’d be called Forgive me.”
To which I smiled (you couldn’t see me) and said,
“Or Forgive me not.”
You said “Beware the ides of March on days we’re distant
from bees and flowers.”
“Not if the bees in the mouth don’t sting,” I said,
“and the air we move is a monk’s in a meditative year.”
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?