M.

“Omens"
Her eyelids were painted blue.
When she closed her eyes the sea
rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots,

leaving behind silence above & below
a thousand years old. He stood beneath
a high arched window, gazing out

at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets
unfurled, their offshore gestures
a dance of living in bluish entourage.

He was only the court’s chief jester.
What he said & did made them laugh,
but lately what he sometimes thought he knew

could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig.
He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor.
Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea.

He had seen the ravishing empress naked
in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow.
Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud.

Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold,
the great one would become a weeping boy
slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules.


Poetry Apr 2012, Vol. 200 Issue 1, p15”
― Yusef Komunyakaa

“كان ثمة هوة بين الحياة التي أرجو خوضها وتلك التي أعيشها, وكنت نهمًا لملئها بالتجارب.”
― عزيز محمد, .الحالة الحرجة للمدعو ك

“كثيرةٌ هى الكلمات التي أبكتني وكفكفتُها”
― سوزان عليوان, كل الطرق تؤدي إلى صلاح سالم

“Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.”
― Laila Lalami, The Other Americans