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Snails circle
A shed where a child was born.
She bled into straw—
Who can write this?
Under Arcturus,
Rubble of light:
We have no words
For what is happening—
Still language endures
Celan said
As he stood in a torn
Green coat
Shivering a little,
In a night theater, in Bremen.
Copyright © 2012 by Meena Alexander. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on December 14, 2012. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
8.
I am in another country. On a morning of clear sunlight, I walk into a garden thousands of miles from where grandmother lived and died. I speak of the Heather Garden at the mouth of Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, a stone’s throw from my apartment.
Kasr Avenue was where the birds lived, In a mud silo millet seeds flourished All winter long and through the dry season Laila was in my soul, also Majnoon’s madness. I was a girl growing up and you, crossing the Nile—yes a flat boat is all you had— Came in, trousers wet and flapping, Sat down with your back to me. Hunayn ibn Ishaq the great physician Thought of the heart as the oven of the body. In the Grand Hotel the waiters wear Cummerbunds, always maroon, over tunics, white I asked for a lemonade with crushed ice. Majnoon lived with his goats in the desert north of here
The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;