I Speak From the Deep End of Night: A Cento
By Sara Elkamel
after Alejandra Pizarnik (1936 –1972), Forugh Farrokhzad (1934 – 1967), Sylvia Plath (1932 –1963) & Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 – 1982)
I speak from the deep end of night.
I speak the way I speak inside.
I am not like my doll, who only feeds on bird’s milk.
I am addicted to my despair.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately.
I crawl like an ant in mourning,
Prayers dripping from lips,
Crossing endlessly through the mirror.
I am familiar with the full range of fear.
I write to ward off fear and the clawing wind that lodges in my throat.
If I am not writing I am thinking about writing.
If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.
I am a girl burned by a ruthless sleep.
All night I flee from someone.
I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.
The sounds that move at a time stops. Starts again.
Suddenly, the temple is a circus and the light is a drum.
You plant words to the moon you send word through the wind.
And you keep running, as unconsoled as a bird alone in the wind.
The words fall like the water—I fall.
Some words are doomed like lilacs in a storm.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
My darling night, my little one, teeming with villains—
The demented wind denies me.
The bad light is near and nothing is real.
The night is me and we have lost.
Please, don’t think I am mourning myself.
I do not want to sing of death.
I imagine I imagine,
Green stones in the house of night.
Magnolia blooms white even on seemingly dead branches.
Where am I? I am in a garden.
I plant my hands in the garden soil—
I smell this plant.
I do not speak of anxious murmurs in the dark.
Look how white everything is, how quiet.
A little plant, with four tiny leaves, constantly grows.
The sunrise floods us with light.
Silence is golden and words are made of silver.
I speak of the silver life of a song.
I speak of deep night ending.
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In order of appearance, this cento borrows lines from: Forugh Farrokhzad (“The Gift”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“Extracting the Stone of Madness,” “[…] Of The Silence”); Forugh Farrokhzad (“The Wind Will Carry Us”); Sylvia Plath (“Mirror,” “The Colossus”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“Wind-Up Doll,” “Paths of the Mirror,” “Primitive Eyes,” “Primitive Eyes”); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (“Dictee”); Sylvia Plath (“Mushrooms”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“The Green Table,” “[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]); Sylvia Plath (“Morning Song”);Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (“Dictee”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“Signs”); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (“Dictee”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“L’obscurité des eaux,” (“L’obscurité des eaux,” “Night, The Poem,”); Sylvia Plath (“Blackberrying”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“[Untitled],” “In the Beginning, They Were My Dead,” “Extracting the Stone of Madness,” “L’obscurité des eaux,” “Only the Nights,” “The Possessed Among the Lilacs”); Forugh Farrokhzad (“I Pity the Garden”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“Diana’s Tree”); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (“Dictee”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“Cornerstone”); Forugh Farrokhzad (“Reborn,” “Window,” “(Inaugurating the Garden”); Sylvia Plath (“Tulips”); Forugh Farrokhzad (“Window,” “The Sun Rises”); Alejandra Pizarnik (“The Possessed Among the Lilacs”); and Forugh Farrokhzad (“Inaugurating the Garden,” “The Gift”).
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About the author:
Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and is an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared in The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, Four Way Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Los Angeles Review, and as part of the anthologies Best New Poets and Best of the Net, among other publications. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).
