Two Poems by Deema K. Shehab
By Deema K. Shehabi
Ghazal: The Sun
Secondhand wrinkles on forehead, she applies kohl in the sun,
eyebrows frown, but then a reprieve: ahh ahh the sun.
Ceasefire: Gaza’s children pour into the school courtyard
and ask, will they—can they— bomb the sun?
My skin’s leafy pattern, your mouth-conjuring
vein, as we trudge along date palms in the sun.
Inside my chest, you are still sewn Palestine, like seedlings
of tiny watermelons, soon-to-become mother balms in the sun.
Fretting in the cell where she has to give birth,
Anhar angles her womb towards a ray, small of sun.
There’s a whole house, he says, little of it my creation,
toys, food, and then there’s me, flailing in the arms of sun.
A global vaccine war, a nationalist agenda, whose flesh mirrors
violence, which ‘other’ befalls empire’s harm in the sun?
Tracery of Dune and Chamomile
(after Marie Howe)
1.
It was only when your eyes finally closed against a weeping cherry lashing your face in the spent season, lashing roses spent in fugue with a long drought, the soil beneath sun-flogged and showing its white, wormy marrow, like it was the beginning again when we wrote each other supplicant sentences, but there was no beginning, as when you held a mirror to my face, saying this is what language is: a smoke crumpling on the light, your voice beyond argument insisting on joining the emphatic dead, when I realized how dream-led I am, my face not yet broken by butterflies.
2.
Defiled by roses, a garden lifting towards the Jura mountains & drinking white butterflies with a half red-face, greenhouses with Damascene roses brushing the distance, but there is no perfume in the air, when in rows of successive summers the woodpecker maims two poplars in ritualistic primal, and in the dream we patch those scars with sawdust, filling until even our nails pierce yellow and our eyes float grit, is this innocence lost, I ask, as you swear your allegiance to poplars over the woodpecker.
3.
Smoke in my nostrils from the Calder Fire, when flames sprout in the hills above Jerusalem, unearthing Palestinian terraces, swelling like topographic maps of our could-have-been childhood, but there was no childhood that wasn’t an allegory, as when I stood outside watering the garden grapevines, all the while feeding my eyes to the ashes & wondering about this colossal of origins, when I finally understood your silence as hope, your nonbelonging to me as hunger.
About the author:
Palestinian American poet Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon, co-author with Marilyn Hacker of Diaspo/Renga, and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabi Street Starts Here. Her work has appeared widely in anthologies and literary journals.
