Five Poems for Slow Devastation
Written in the mode of observation
Dear my friends,
I am working with a workshop “Writing Against Borders” by NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies before the Winter School starts in January. The workshop has been created and pursued by scholars, writers and students who ruminate and write into the notion of physical borders and mental borders. Join us if you want to read and discuss on this topic.
At the borders, there is always violence. Inside the borders, there are victims targeted by the label “the others” - the vulnerable groups being used, bullied and killed by the superior groups. There are radicalized victims and radicalized perpetrators. There are worthy victims and unworthy victims, even painful past can be labeled as shame and terror.
After the first meeting of this season at Writing Against Borders, I wrote these poems, my only therapeutic methods to reconciliate with what is happening beyond my reach.
A Day like Today
A day like today as you count the death number assuring yourself it is just a digital chart although your heart skips when it rises like heatwave A day like today you scream on squares and streets people tumble down because tears can't hold lives because the sea promises rising its salty empathy The day your hopelessness cracks a giant crevasse where your light seeps in from the darkness holding your neck - your throat is stopped by eroded glaciers A day when concrete powder flies into your dream- -or-nightmare under which bodies lie in imperfect pieces you wander collecting leftovers of weakened sobbing A day like today you turn off your device - disconnected from the anguish you can't reach soothe or ease you can't do anything because your world is burning the rain has turned into a hurricane so quick
Hunger Season
The straw shed casted a shadow on rotten
soils. The daughter gazed at gnawing
teeth - rumbling concrete banks
Her heels peeled off the sand
Hungry souls wandered on ripples
tears on the lost dwellings
The wind swept by failing gardens
Slithering wounds.
From wars to famines
The dying flecks shone
over cold rice
Hundred-year-shadows
vanished; the soil evanesced
Ancestors walked like paper puppets
mourning their missing children
pierced by fired bullets
[in an erased war].
The girl munched dead kernels
Hunger thinned her
into a paper cutout, taped
on a corroded wall.
Milky seedlings tasted salty.
Water Sonnet
Drink this water from the highest mountains Splitting glaciers and feeding mangoes This water diffuses Tibetan's monks' ash from their self-immolation yearning return Drink this water, taste those scattered from home in the cursing power of our shinning Buddha Gulp this water diluting temple's smoke mourning Vientiane sky, Thai's stampeding elephants May Buddha melt on fire on flesh on killing fields His lips swallows the bleeding Tonle Sap The land the sun never sets all summers Borders sketches his fraudulent smirks Now drown in water where Buddha betrays--- Concrete dams choke the way to oceans.
My neighbor is a machine gun
peeking Cairo from a dark window
My neighbor is a machine gun staring at me through the desert-covered eyelashes My neighbor is a king's stone ears listening to sand howling dreams into tornadoes My neighbor squints her eyes of Horus bleeding the sun licking the baby sheep's cry My neighbor whispers her secret invitation thick as camel's milk, sweetly dark dates My neighbor's body trembles the sand swallows our feet, chases wandering mind A fly flaps her wings and dives into the camel's eye well - into an explosion Our orange sun smells gun power My lips kiss the horizontal melting barrel.
The Peace that Creates Me
Peace munches my head- -a cricket chirps into the liquified night Peace in decades of illusion sinks my knees until I genuflect A beggar for peace sees a hole on his palms leaking reality the sky is tattered, threads of hope wrap around my necks and squeeze peace nibbles my finger bones spits out grains of brutality the illusion swallows tolerance conceiving a creature of glutton I am born of this cannibalization.
Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed this article, you can buy me a coffee below or simply share this article with a friend.