Birthplace with Buried Stones: Poems

Acknowledgments

121 acknowledgments I am grateful to the editors of the journals where these poems first appeared: Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire: “In the Garden of Freemasons,” “Question Time,” “reading Imru’ al-Qays on the Subway” (under the title “resurrection day”), “Water Crossing” (under the title “living in the World”) Callaloo: “Graduation 1949” Guernica: “nocturne” Harvard Review: “experimental Geography,” “morning ritual” The Hindu Literary Review: “mamilla Cemetery” Indiana Review: “Snow” The Kenyon Review: “Cobblestones and Heels” KR Online: “Garden in nazareth” Literary Imagination: Sonnets II, III of “Stump Work” (under the titles “Jihad” and “exequy”) The Literary Review: “damage.” In a slightly different form, this poem cycle appeared in the online literary magazine Almost Island. The Little Magazine: “Sita’s abduction with Shadow Puppets” The Massachusetts Review: “nocturnal with Ghostly landscape on St. lucy’s day,” “On Indian road” Meridians: “lost Garden” (under the title “The Garden”). This poem also appears in Writing Love: An Anthology of Indian-English Poetry, ed. ashmi ahluwalia (new delhi: rupa, 2010). The New Yorker: “lady dufferin’s Terrace” Norman Mailer Writers Colony Blog (July 30, 2011): “red Boat” Painted Bride Quarterly: “Stone Bridge,” Sonnet IV of “Stump Work” (under the title “Wind Song”) phati’tude Literary Magazine: Sonnet I of “Stump Work” (under the title “Traces”) Ploughshares: “Birthplace with Buried Stones” Postcolonial Text: “elegy,” “Indian Hospice,” “Teatro Olimpico” Prairie Schooner: “For my Father, Karachi 1947,” “Summer Splendor.” These two poems received the Glenna luschei Prairie Schooner award. 122 The Threepenny Review: “migrant memory” TriQuarterly: “Plot of Tiger lilies” (under the title “In the Garden of Tiger lilies”) TriQuarterly Online: “Impossible Grace,” “red Bird” Washington Square Review: “landscape with Kurinji Flowers” Weber: The Contemporary West: “afterwards, Your loneliness,” “Boy from rum” World Literature Today: “June air,” “Star drift” (under the title “Sitting in Starbucks”) WSQ: “mother, Windblown” * These poems in the opening section—“morning ritual,” “lychees,” “red Bird,” “Bryant Park,” “near Sendai,” “Bamboo,” “Suite 19, Viceregal lodge,” “landscape with Ghost,” “lady dufferin’s Terrace”—are also published as a limited-edition chapbook, Shimla: A Poem Cycle (new York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2012). my thanks to Glenn Horowitz. “Teatro Olimpico,” “nocturne,” “Cobblestones and Heels,” “Indian Hospice,” “Garden in nazareth,” “Impossible Grace,” and “mamilla Cemetery” appear in the limited-edition chapbook Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems (Jerusalem: Centre for Jerusalem Studies, al-Quds University, 2012). my thanks to Huda Imam. The poem “Impossible Grace” was set to music by Stefan Heckel (winner of the al Quds music award) and sung by baritone Christian Oldenburg, Hind el Husseini College, in Jerusalem on October 7, 2012. my thanks to Petra Klose. * my special gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a Fellowship in Poetry allowing me the time and space for composition. I could not have done it without the support. Thanks to the Camargo Foundation for three sun-filled months in Cassis, on the mediterranean; to Hunter 123 College for giving me the time to travel and write; to Peter de Souza of the Indian Institute of advanced Study in Shimla, for inviting me as a visiting professor—it was in the Himalayas that I was able to imagine other lives from the past, ghosts that still haunt us. and how can I forget Sari nusseibeh, whom I met at the Institute in Shimla. He sensed my longing to see Jerusalem again—I had last been there as a child—and with great kindness he invited me to come as Poet-in-residence to al Quds University. It was there, almost unknown to me, that the heart of this book started to take shape. my thanks to the Fulbright Foundation for a Senior Specialist award which allowed me a month in residence at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice—I sat by the Zattere and dared to imagine a whole book. I carried this manuscript with me as I travelled, and it grew in bits and pieces, on scraps of paper, in notebooks, sometimes on a laptop, and of course in the rhythms of memory—I often compose as I walk. at the norman mailer Center and Writers Colony at the edge of the shimmering waters of Cape Cod Bay I was able to complete poems begun in the Himalayas and write new poems. at the Vermont Studio Center I was able to complete “Cantata for a riderless Horse.” * One writes in loneliness, that seems to be the way. But I could not imagine completing this work without friends...