Excerpts from Diaspo/Rengi
Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi
M
The Litani flows
under the Pont Sully, past four
Arabic bookshops.
(One is run by anarchists.)
She stops to watch a barge pass.
The Crusaders gave
her those blue-green eyes. Not that
interrogative
smile at the cadence of wind
tangling her kinky black hair.
D
Beneath the bougainvillea pot
and the jasmine-latticed balcony,
her brother looks back nervously
and sees the stray mongrel
cross the street in close pursuit.
He thinks to himself: I`ve
survived the tyranny of border guards
and one or two wars, but is this
the end---death by dog in an unknown
alleyway that smells of the sea?
M
Dogs ion the port street
fighting over a fish-head,
spoiled fruit – he can smell
the discarded orange peels
guards threw to exiled children.
He was sixteen then,
no dog, no child, a teacher.
Others learned to read
from the tea-stained grammar book
he’d grabbed up first when they fled.
D
On the morning of their first
departure, he looks back
from the car window
to imprint an eternal picture
of Jerusalem in his mind.
He sees his mother
holding up her palms
as he drops his breath
so no-one can hear: until,
until we meet again.
M
The halal butcher
has a charity tin for
Enfants de Gaza.
I pay for my leg of lamb
and drop in all of the change,
walk away up the
rue de la Roquette humming
“Guantanamera”.
On the place Voltaire, a white
lady can enjoy the joke.
D
The joke`s on us.
The white phosphorus
was first tried in Fallujah.
We are from Rawa,
a proud people from across
the river. You think
it`s easy being a man
watching this thrashing unfold.
Sister, don`t forget Iraq
and Palestine are one wound.
M
If this be a man…
don`t mistranslate him into
a single language,
a single landscape of loss,
claim there`s one story only.
He steeps black tea. She
boils water for cardamom
coffee. Would they have
words for each other`s sorrow
if they had learned the same words?
D
He asks her as she turns away,
“Do you carry the death
of a few tribes
on your shoulders?”
If they learned to find
their way back through
a field of turkey vultures
and pear trees, would she then
remember to compose a song
about water and moving moons?
M
Jamil Buthaina:
You still savor your youth, but
Age caught up with me.
The translator marks a word
in her qamus, chews the pen.
Student from Nablus,
she promised herself not to
mention your dark eyes
but in this poem fourteen
centuries old, strokes your hair.
D
Who was that little girl with Damascene
eyes holding her father`s hand
in the Shabandar Café, early morning,
maybe twenty years ago, on al-Mutanabbi
Street? Her eyes had excavated through him—
Was it his loud voice that angered her,
or his confidence among all the men?
Maybe she`s an expensive cabaret
dancer now, and he`ll finally find her
concealed in a bar, incense hovering.
M
In Damascus, she
reads her son’s letter. He wants
to translate a book
a Jewish journalist wrote
with a Palestinian
prisoner of war,
from French into Arabic.
His carte de séjour
was renewed. As she folds up
the foolscap, she remembers
D
standing on the balcony
of her tiny apartment
in Kuwait overlooking the Gulf.
The smell of iodine so sharp
in her nostrils as she watched
the neighborhood kids
listening to Saber`s crazy
stories of goat-hooved spirits
who linger at the fourth
ring road. Dear God, she sighs,
M
covering her face
with the abaya behind
the hired car’s smoked glass.
Môsul’s main streets are jagged
with potholes. Before the war
she drove her own car
to the university.
She’d thrust the letter-
menace into her book-bag.
Tomorrow at dawn she’ll go
D
visit her father`s grave
and read the Fatiha.
Who knows when she`ll
return? The word refugee makes
her cringe. She`ll go, but she`ll carry
the sound of his voice calling her name.
How does one say farewell
to Iraq, Iraq, Nothing But Iraq?
She grabs a fistful of ground.
M
Her hands full of earth,
she kneels, in red suede high heels,
in her small garden.
She cn hear the traffic hum
out toward the périphérique.
She’s planting jasmine
after lunch, in a silk dress.
When she was young, though
the rich had gardens and books,
she made up the best stories.
D
After she died, he`d lie down
on the great white bed
where she used to comb
his eyebrows with her fingers
until he fell asleep. He`d wake
to the early evening
muezzin, the roasting freekeh,
and the poem:
Sitting in a garden
ropes of wisteria.
M
Sitting on damp grass,
she recites the Fatiha
on Dickinson`s lawn.
Slowly, her Anglophone friend
repeats each verse after her.
"When I go home, I`ll
either build a house or buy
a plot for a grave."
"Insh`allah, you`ll build a house.
Keep that line for a poem."
D
Green house with large
veranda, orange-black
swirls on tulip tiles.
Fatima slices lemons,
dips them into salt, smiles
as the other women sing:
“Tal`aa min beit abouha”
In a few hours, she`ll wax
her entire body. Lemon sores
on tongue, newborn baby skin.
M
A sore on his tongue,
the accent he has now in
his father’s language –
again, a taxi driver
asked him “Aina darasta?”
High-rise in Detroit,
hospital in South Beirut,
every cloned airport –
razed port town’s morning-coffee
syllables he’s never heard.
D
He takes the morning coffee
with him to the bathroom
where he`s king for awhile.
The door locked, the window
cracked open—he hears
the gardener cursing
the shepherd—You son of a dog!
He clears his throat, washes up,
as she stumbles in her long
nightgown: “Sabah el-full ya amar.”
M
"Morning of roses,"
she wishes the greengrocer.
"Morning of light," he
answers. Early cherries ripen,
and the small sweet strawberries.
Last week she came home.
The sky seems wider, brightere
despite what`s missing.
That stray cat is a brother,
the dawn rain a childhood friend.
* * *
[Excerpts from Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi, Diaspo/Renga, (Holland Park Press, 2014) with permission of the authors. For more or to buy the book click here.]