Migration Narrative, and: Poems of Arab Andalusia

Migration Narrative

What wilts becomes the world for the weary. They can’t help but

wonder at the lovely shadow touch of another war’s rubbled song.

If crossing freely into fire can churn the blood’s hollow music, then

surely the orphan can ask at dusk for water and get more than spit.

Poems of Arab Andalusia

Turtles cavortin their capes of green algae

ibn sarah

I

In one of these poems, the poet writes, “Birds trill on the branches like singing girls / bending over their lutes,” and when I look up, I see them outside my window, on this last warm day of winter, looking not lost but adrift.

“She is an immigrant,” I read, “from other lands.”

On the table beside me, a teapot of steaming water, a sachet of Ceylon, a teddy bear of honey. “Inside the palanquins on the camels’ backs I saw their faces beautiful as moons / behind veils of gold cloth.” Tell me, Friend, who is it who worries so much about the turtles, wrapped in ribbons of foam, lounging on the lonely beaches of Andalusia?

Ii

Once a student asked you if it mattered, all this effort and pain, losing sleep, your health, all the loneliness it entailed, to puzzle through the words of dead poets. That night, you, a young man too, opened up this anthology, a gift from a friend long forgotten and found the answer:

  Look at me,   I dress myself in the white   of white hair   in mourning for youth.

Your pillow in the morning was a turtle swimming in a sea of tears, carrying another load of words. What hatched within the sand: the vocabulary of wholeness taken slow.

Iii

as the light of wakefulness   fills the body as the whir of holiness    tunes the soul as the aftermath of heartbreak  thimbles gratitude           into each passing hour as the sweep of time   nuzzles its hot breath     against the embers       of a lived life         against spheres           of dalliance             and pleasure

Iv

Remembering: one evening, after school: a peaceful blizzard: the chime-heavy ruefulness of snow falling in great big clumps: the snow falling in great big clumps: the parking lot like a cemetery: the snowballs arcing through the pink sky: the snowballs bursting open midflight: the snowballs like shooting stars: the wishes wished: the innocence of boyhood reawakened: the perfection of it: the rest of your life as untouched: the morning, years later, as you drove to school, reminded of that evening by the white snow of spring blossoms: how deeply you wept, remembering that evening, the snow: the warmth, the companionship, the unutterable thing that waits on the other side of retirement: the mathematics of clocks: the mathematics of memory: the mercy of remembering, of snowballs returning to snow.

V

A book set on fire provides a different kind of warmth.

Our grandmothers taught us to love ourselves. We are obedient children. We are honest.

“She may not know where the mosque is,” I read, “but she knows the location / of all the taverns.”

Our hands hold the words of dead poets. Time holds as still as turtles asleep in the trees.

Vi

as the ghosts arrive along the shore to sing their songs to the sea

as we go from lost to adrift

Vii

The tea has gone cold. The student is somewhere else, surprised by the depths of his sadness. Perhaps he now understands this craving for poems.

Snow, even in June. Snow, dusting every memory of Andalusia.

Evening arrives too soon.

The tree, again a collection of vacancies.

The silences, nothings readying for the next poem.

Let’s turn the page together and read: “There are splendors of such perfection they all bring to mind the beauty of absolute certainty, the radiance of faith.”

Viii

As we go from lost to adrift to dust,

may it be with the urgency of turtles.

Note: All the quoted lines, as well as those in italics, are taken from Poems of Arab Andalusia translated by Cola Franzen, an anthology after which this poem is...