Ghazal
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Mt. Diablo’s snowy peak dips into the skin; oh that lull in the distance. In the valley, the soccer mom snaps at her son as he falls in the distance.
I’m still as fierce and unconquerable as the Tigris, says Wafaa’, and I’ll flow backwards in time to return to Mosul in the distance.
O tribes of this land, we, too, saw morning’s flare in the palm lines of children; their eyes interrogated our useless vigil in the distance.
Songs criss-crossed in the wind through willowed thickets where the homeless child once slept on a thistle in the distance.
Thieving bird, what’s the name for this ecology: your feathers gusting on a tenebrous leaf skull in the distance?
What’s in a name? Neither hands, nor feet, says the master poet, but we fought to name our lands when we were youthful in the distance.
How many of you here actually believe in God, asked the child, and what of the spider and his epic webs that still tremble in the distance?
Pray for me, dear pilgrim, as I have forgotten God in the midst of these bountiful curves, and I feel so unworthy of this sacred toil in the distance.
Who do you blame for disasters outside or within your borders: the sick, the dying, or the conqueror within—threats that triple in the distance! [End Page 1161]
Deema K. Shehabi, Vice-President for the Radius of Arab-American Writers, is a Palestinian poet whose poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Poetry of Arab Women, The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, Crab Orchard, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab-American Poetry.
