All posts in Poetry

You are everything, and nothing, like my grandmothers

/ 25 Jan ’12 / Poetry / No Comments

Towards the end, they both wore black only, just like you.

They both wore black for their husbands, men gone long before the women,
one went so fast I did not see him at all.

Helena was your height, wore glasses, tinted, her hair always wrapped tight
in a bun, and its length, I never knew.

Alice was taller but as time passed, her body slipped down,
lower to the ground, her back curving in on itself, unable to support a body,
even as frail as hers.

Helena was quiet, calling our names, she would go through the list
of daughters in the family, before reaching the one she wanted.

Alice commanded attention, even when her eyesight failed
and it meant reaching her bony hand out
and pulling us to her
not sure which grandchild she held onto.

Towards the end, Helena faltered, and went quiet, while my mother and I
were at the other end of the continent.
We were told days later, and I watched my mother
drop the phone, drop to the ground
and become a little girl again.

Towards the end, Alice’s sight and hearing and breathing went
in a hospital bed
surrounded by daughters, sons, grandchildren, great grandchildren,
I among them
hurting for my father, and his tears that would not fall.

I did not know either of them very well
raised far from the arms of two families
each on a different continent
and family for me
only meant a father, mother and sister

Aunts, uncles, cousins, all thousands of miles away
becoming friends and enemies only after my 18th birthday.

But you, standing in the street,
make me ache
for the grandmother

I did not have.

We are filled with pain and crushed bones

/ 16 Oct ’11 / Egypt, Poetry / 1 Comment

We fall under
tanks that do not stop
not for screams of pain, or skin and bone

not for children or babies
old women who cannot run fast enough
to outrun
tonnes of steel

not for men who
had they turned
one degree,
would have seen
death so wide and so forceful
that there was no way to run
and hide

there are wounds that will not go away
broken bones that cannot heal
not when all that they hold
begins to fall out
and spill onto
the ground

not when a tank runs over a live body
and in 5 short seconds
what was once alive is
now
dead

we hope

because their bones
have bent in ways
we did not think possible

have cracked and proven brittle
easy to snap, to crush
like it was nothing.

Like it wasn’t a father who was dying
or a son who’s mother
would scream, hit her face, to feel pain
but feels nothing
nothing

knowing

that a tank
hundreds of thousands of pounds
of weight

fell, angonizingly slow,
covering an entire body
with its wheels.

No, bone should not break
that easily.

Hearts should not feel
cracked
like our chests have caved in
on themslves
and words come out

split in two

part word, part nothing that the human ear
can understand.

No, there are wounds here
that will never
heal

there is resolve here
that cannot be broken

the resolve of men and women
wills written
and ready

saying

we would rather die
for these streets, these cities,
these people

than to live
in ways where

life is worth
a cracked skull
under a heavy tank

and nothing

more.

As winter comes

/ 14 Oct ’11 / Poetry / 1 Comment

For as much as photography is my passion, poetry is and always has been my first love. I used to write on a daily basis and now, for years, writer’s block, or something akin to that feeling like you want to write but the words won’t come out, has been impossible to shake. I’ve been going through my old poetry, hoping to find some inspiration. I wrote this poem in 2004.

There are prints of flowers and leaves
on a wall that has forgotten spring.

There are hands that hold
these feelings inside
of rushed 2 am confessions, that come to nothing,
and children’s names that go with us
to our graves.

There is more of emptiness
than anything else.

And no matter how you place your hands,
or how tightly your fingers
curl around the flesh of your stomach

there will always be this distance.

In it, we will place the things
that have fallen out of our reach.

Your stories of 1939, that were never true
even if they made us smile.
Crisp white table cloths and wine red napkins.
Conversations under shadowed wisps of strings that pull,
over the clink of near-empty glasses of chardonnay.

No,
we will forget.

We will forget what it felt like
to hold summer in our bellies.

And we will be empty
inside.

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For Tahrir, for Egypt

/ 7 Oct ’11 / Poetry / No Comments

In that public square
named for fate and history
as though it knew what was to come
we stood our ground
saying, we will not be moved
painted poems on the hard asphalt
that had softened, soaking in our blood

and the world watched.

The world watched as we were called
traitors
and on television screens
in homes, doors locked refusing to let in
the truth,
men spit scorn into cameras
and women screamed into their phones
eyes and hearts full of rage
unable to understand
that Tahrir was theirs, for them,
while government eyes showed only what they wanted
us to see
the sun setting over the Nile

but all it would take, was the smallest turn of the head to the left
a glance from the corner of the eye
to show the haze of Cairo’s sun through tear gas,
to show men charging the street with only their bodies
met with police trucks running them down.

Newspapers wrote of unrest across the Mediterranean
pretending that this day that had begun in Cairo
was like any other.

But something had begun.

Men and women shook the earth
with their voices.

From north to south
bodies fell to the ground, hearts stopped beating
but in Tahrir, we held our heads high for them
moving away from the walls that, our whole lives
we had walked close to, hiding in the shadow
of conformity and fear

opened our chests to murder
opened our faces to rocks, our eyes to bullets
our minds to molotov fires thrown down onto our heads

and said

we are not afraid

because the fear of living with your face buried
in the soil of a land that can no longer feel
is nothing, nothing compared to
the fear of dying
without once having said

I am free.