Gaza
On his unearthed chest, she lays three thyme-braised ghazals.
History on repeat, she mourns like Al-Khansa’, broken &
splayed by ghazals.
Brown-eyed girl, wounded child with no surviving family, shakes
on camera, silencing her domestic rhythms & overplayed ghazals.
There’s no room on the train for dark-skinned refugees;
pundits sing for a white Europe free of humane ghazals.
On the phone, Shadab says, I believe. Beneath the rubble, a child
sees an angel’s oiled light opening a gateway for ghazals.
She retaliates for her neighbor’s insult. Rudeness
can only be handled one way by practitioners of émigré ghazals.
‘It’s now or never,’ he sings as the bombs fall on Gaza.
From a sunlit room, his deep-cigarette voice beats all plaintive ghazals.
Like this Far Mosque, you’re always there for me. What name
do we give it, this rain light we bend for weighted ghazals?
November: Indian summer warmth lulls the poet to sleep,
but she wakes to a war-wind stir, parched leaves, crimson paper ghazals.
Home
On Highway 1, you belt me with: there’s no home outside home,
but here’s a sun hurtling on my chest & a Fairuz song rewriting home.
Thirty years since her death, I spread my body over her grave, two
sons watch, bleary-eyed. What’s a mother but a magnified home?
O’ love, I’m the only Umayyad left, the sole Abdel Rahman. On your
diaphanous collar bone, the New Damascus, our bona-fide home.
At dusk in a Fresno orchard, we identified Palestine’s trees: Baloot,
Sidr, Qaiqab, Zeitoun, but we still couldn’t override home.
Son, I lied when I said a sparrow saw you through the window;
there’s no spoon full of sugar for my longing to keep you inside home.
Grenades erupt from your eyes when fatherhood chews you out.
Forget kisses behind the closet, secret darling, let’s fly home.
I don’t know how the human heart can recover from moral injury,
he said. How do I go on with none left beside me to define home?
Al-Ghazali: true friends are those who remind us of the One Friend;
What do you call these anemones leaning towards us on the ride home?