two arms in air,
in dance, after catastrophe.

the body the universe the body

the fabric held at two points:

i am lamb. i am shepherd.

a star waits.
the stars are a map in the noon of it all.

a letter, a relic from a gone civilization.
a ن holds the tail of the snake.
a ن holds a star in its ark.
a ن is a prayer before Time.

hearsay: the whale swallowed the sun.
there, an eclipse, the sun’s wispy corona.

hearsay: the whale spit it out.
returned our sun to us, this time.

a small circle silences.
a set of small teeth doubles.
this, the machine,
my grandmother’s language,
gifted her by holy fish,
forbidden her by man.
in a dream, she and i,
two pisces fish, whispering friends
in the noon of it all.

a ن today
on my brother’s door.
a ن between my legs.
a ن on my neighbor’s cheek.
you, you hold the broken in me.
you, you hold the setting sun.
you, you escape
the mouth of death.
reconstituted
in the noon
of the universe.

single seed. bijou in float.
there, there waits the ark.

A note on this poem, an invitation:

Oh noon, the letter ن, intoning the -n- sound, pronounced noon.
A Semitic letter, really, in Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and through some
starcrossed lineage, it has a cousin in Sanskrit, maybe even the same DNA.
Some say the letter got its shape from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a snake.
Some say the snake morphed into a whale, a fish, a dolphin. In the Qur’an,
the Surah of The Pen begins by saying that the ن and the pen are in the act of
writing, as if the ن were capable of script, were it not script itself. Were it not
a snake, a whale, a palimpsest. What writes us as we write it. In Arabic class,
Professor Hani drew a ن on the board and asked us what it looked like.
He wanted us to say a cup. We saw an ark instead, a boat. And true,
the ancients believed it might be a cup. And true, the scholars
believe it to be a boat, holding a seed, the seed of the universe,
awaiting rebirth after apocalypse. Birth, as in pregnant
womb, though this isn’t in the scholarly texts.
Some liken it to a setting sun.
And Jonah, prophet who found God in the whale.
The floating diacritical dot, Jonah escaping death.
A noon as the beginning and end of existence.
These days, in Iraq, in Syria, elsewhere
being ravaged by death squads,
a symbol is painted on people’s doors.
ن
for Nazarene.
For anyone who does not submit to tyranny.
There, there waits the ark.

Poets

Kamelya Omayma Youssef

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