Fridays in the Park (or how to make a boy holy) by Omar Sakr

Fridays in the Park

(or how to make a boy holy)

& i can’t help but notice his hips first, bumbag slung low,

as the train doors open at Roxburgh Park. & i take in the

trackies, his shadowed jaw, the slabs of concrete arcing

over him. & as Arab boys are timeless or else stuck in time,

i breathe easier in their pause, their familiar inescapable

heat. & later, i spot him in the supermarket & know he

knows i’m watching the way a shepherd tends his flock

or the way the ocean shivers when the moon slides onto

its back. & there is no significant body of water in the

suburbs, nothing to drown in yet we drown anyway. & i

take him in the long grass of the park, i taste him in the

weeds, knees wet with mud, the night buzzing with the

deaths of mosquitoes. the wild silence after, mouths heavy

with musk, is complete & even the birds are mute with

love in their nests. there is no song except our huffed

breaths, the shuffle of grass bending beneath us, tickling

skin, the whole world an animal gone quiet. i asked

my aunty about the supernatural hush i felt & she said

the animals stand still in holy awe, they know the Day

of Judgment will fall on a Friday. & this is why neither

of us made a sound, why his fingers bruised my lips to

crush the gasping as one of us disappeared into the other,

why the park bristled with jungle knowing, the kind

with teeth, why it felt like the end of the world &

the beginning, o the beginning of another.

For My Daughter in Reply to a Question by David Ignatow

For My Daughter in Reply to a Question

We’re not going to die.

We’ll find a way.

We’ll breathe deeply

and eat carefully.

We’ll think always on life.

There’ll be no fading for you or for me.

We’ll be the first

and we’ll not laugh at ourselves ever

and your children will be my grandchildren.

Nothing will have changed

except by addition.

There’ll never be another as you

and never another as I.

No one ever will confuse you

nor confuse me with another.

We will not be forgotten and passed over

and buried under the births and deaths to come. 

I Came to You by Jean Valentine

I Came to You

I came to you

Lord, because of

the fucking reticence

of this world

no, not the world, not reticence, oh

          Lord Come

          Lord Come

We were sad on the ground

          Lord Come

We were sad on the ground 

Refugee Blues by W. H. Auden

Refugee Blues

Say this city has ten million souls,

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:

Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

 

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:

We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

 

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,

Every spring it blossoms anew;

Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

 

The consul banged the table and said:

‘If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead’;

But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

 

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;

Asked me politely to return next year:

But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?

 

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:

‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’;

He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

 

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;

It was Hitler over Europe, saying: ‘They must die’;

We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.

 

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in:

But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

 

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,

Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:

Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

 

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;

They had no politicians and sang at their ease:

They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

 

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,

A thousand windows and a thousand doors;

Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

 

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;

Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:

Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me. 

Tenderness by Derrick Austin

Tenderness

That summer I was a body. I was that body. The Body.

Overnight, a fog of linen inside the mauve Victorian down the block.

Another house empty for the season, for the season, for the season.

Hours built up on both sides of my bedroom door.

Morgan and Danez rowed in the Grand Canal at Versailles.

Morgan filled a postcard with her hands and memory.

Rose quartz? A diary? Holy water? (With what belief?) What could I have asked for?

Leaving my apartment for the first time in days,

I walked five minutes to Lake Mendota. Barking, honking, shrieking, grunting.

Men tested their bodies for each other and themselves.

Opened doors to admit the breeze, the possibility of that one guest.

When Emily Brontë wrote they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water,

and altered the colour of my mind, she wasn’t writing about my depression.

Double tapped a photo of Morgan and Angel

posing near a green door with hinges older than the Constitution.

They read their black poems in English

to black people who spoke English and French and Arabic.

If I sent a postcard to everyone I loved

it’d say, Sometimes I think you’re just too good for me.

The most personal question I’m consistently asked: Why are you so quiet?

That I’m getting this all down wrong. That I’m getting it down at all.

Psalm of Despair by Radmila Lazić

Psalm of Despair

I dwell in a land of despair

In the city of despair

Among desperate people

Myself desperate

I embrace my desperate lover

With desperate hands

Whispering desperate words

Kissing him with desperate lips.

 

In despair we make children

In despair we strangle them

And feed our desperate offspring

With our own despair

So that they may multiply

By giving birth to ever more desperate children

And so on.

 

For the God of Despair is our Lord

And his envoys of despair

With their instruments of despair

That coat our homes with despair

Drape our windows with despair

And board up our doors with it

As despair rises around us like walls.

 

Preaching the religion of despair

For gain and wealth

Instructing us in Holy Despair

For which we are to earn life eternal

So our dead will rise again

In despair.

 

The wandering lamb

That found no path or shelter

No dawn and no morning

Forever and ever—

 

Damn you wicked hand

That wrote this in the year 2013 of our Lord.

 

(Translated by Charles Simić)

from 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins

from 13^th Balloon

Imagine a bird who lays her egg

then picks it up and flies without

landing until it hatches

Imagine a thousand

of these birds chopping away

at the soggy light

 

Since you died a thousand birds

have daily flown through me

 

each leaving behind an egg

      some of which rotted

some of which hatched

releasing more birds that pecked

at my skull

            but not generating the noise

            and pain one might expect

                        It’s more like hearing

                  someone typing

            an endless suicide note

            in a room at the end

            of a carpeted hall

 

Always one egg remains in me intact

and each time I yank it out

each time I crack it and crush it and throw

away the shell

      it reappears whole

 

I pull it out and pull it out

 

I break it a thousand times

but nothing is ever inside

 

I carry it and carry it           I do not land