"Psalm.
Departure."
"Locusts wrap the sun in gauze, the river swallows its banks.
No pleasure but seeing the no-king crop
here, the no-fields, a petrified forest where twins are slain.
Someone will follow a bird.
The work of fire never ends--
Djinn build cities of mirage, the poor stand waiting
by the shore.
Signs made of spider dust, signs made of stardust and spider
thread.
Any way you measure it, the difference will be a road."
"Season of Migration to the North/Northwest."
"Spent years gathering eucalyptus
leaves from King Menelik's forests--
their fire makes the best injera, I'm told.
You climb wheezing, choking, on Addis air,
then you find yourself in these scented woods.
Back breaking, but I love bundling
the leaves, how the rain soaks the scent into your clothes
and skin.
Maybe that's why Menelik built his palace here,
a great church looming over it to show he was content.
But even he was tempted away; his queen sent a messenger
from the foot of Entoto saying she's found a new addis
flower, ababa, and he followed her like Adam out of paradise
to cofound the metropolis nightmare.
Was my dream worth more than enough to live--
air to live on something between banal sin
and the creator's potency?
Addis to the source of the Nile, then Khartoum to Sinai,
to be an asylee in Tel Aviv, or northwest
through Darfur and Sebha, to the Bride of the Med.
Names like shabby trees on a map, lines from a screen
where bodies are stick figures dancing to tepid applause.
Each a degree in a circle inside a void,
unmarked time, days like scentless
leaves that slip through your hands."
"Testimony."
"How am I not one of the gone?
How did the hand know to snatch my child from my breast?
A succubus angel wanders the desert,
clouds swirls below the sand."
"Agadez Blues."
"No place, no money for the bed.
Je dors dans la rue paid only the way.
Even God can't see me here.
Police take your money quand tu n'as pas d'argent.
Even God can't hear me here.
Ils te palpent tu le corps pour vérifier palpent all your body.
Even God can't save me here.
I pay 1,300 francs go to Libye mais le chauffeur, il est
parti.
Even God can't help me here.
Je n'ai plus rien pour manger.
Je n'ai plus rien pour dormir.
Even God can't find me here.
I work a small town so intense other refugees pay just so I
can stitch, stitch by stitch."
"Song."
In this poem, I mention Mount Acacus,
which is a great mountain in the northwest of Libya.
And there are caves in that area.
It's also a famous area for caves in northeastern Algeria.
And in the caves are drawings of herds.
It's all desert, but in the caves
are drawings of herds of bulls, animals, just the drawings
are thousands of years old, but also
drawings of Egyptian chariots.
So apparently, Egyptian chariots had made it--
used to go from the Nile Valley all the way to what
is now the heart of the desert.
So this poem reminiscences, if you will, a song.
"How could I not be but a stone now,
deep in the caves of Acacus and memory thrives.
Herds of bulls, and red ocher, and gray-green hues,
demigods riding Egyptian chariots breezing through when
the land was arable still.
What sound can my stone throw make now?
What can it voice?
How can it voice these memorial arid winds?"
"Tripoli Days."
If I sweep this floor, pack this meat,
pluck these olives until my palms bleed,
what outcome is postponed, multiplied into my years?
Not just your labor, your life is cheap, too.
So you pay and pray.
Yet but if there is no place, only harbors, no pillow
or window frame, only more space for the sullen dream to grow
and digress."
"Psalm to Memory."
"At peace in the palm--
embers, perfumes, the sense of Abyssinia and Mecca
hunt the brain.
You remember weddings and feasts.
Hail pocked the copper dust, and you, open mouth,
gazing at the world.
Years have passed since that since.
How does the body know how to pin so much of itself
in words?"
Malouk is the poet in Abu Bakr Khaal's novel.
"I tap a few words to her on WhatsApp or Viber
to blot out the day.
I bring my nose close to the screen
to smell the photos she sends.
Selfies of her by the gas stove or the baby
making a gesture, a smile or a yawn or cry.
Sometimes a video of an old song.
She asks about the sea; it's calm
but the traffickers no show.
She breaks me, a softness that turns me dusk,
I, the poet dissident, who labored
to rephrase with healing the nations' inflamed contract, who
roved the bone sculptures made governments,
the sanctuaries filled fear-bright eyes, my words
now monosyllabic soft as sighs.
There was blindness in my game, my epic of home.
I hear the smugglers, their pupils
shifting as if following a maddened gull,
some bootleg spasm and discharge.
A blindness that cannot stop seeing,
these eyes will keep shifting like this in their graves.
I see my spirit too, a plastic cloud drifting in the breeze.
With them is our last chance, but for what?
From the village drying up to sand, the town without jobs,
the hands that never learned to write,
the eyes that barely read, the soul hunger stump and trade.
Am I writing my poem again?
Have I become the exile I so mock and detest?
How to walk this sea?
How to not believe that much is possible?
Arrived in Kufa, the cramped 4x4s,
the Hilux were spent bodies cling to wooden poles, IVECOs,
hundred-packed swaying death's wave.
Emptied in the camp, divided between sheets of galvanize,
the courtyard littered-- bottles, clothes,
old photographs-- like some carnival bacchanal
the night before, a town facing massacre just fled.
An empty, once-crowded barracoon where the signal
is one ribbon strong.
It is from here that I send her all my love.
"Amadou's Boss."
"One minute, Amadou is here.
You send him to fetch bucket of water or to buy fresh bread.
Another minute, he gets a phone call.
And in no time, he's in Garabulli or Zuwara
getting on a boat.
Sometimes he'll call from Lampedusa, giggling, happy,
saying sorry he's gone.
Sometimes he does not call at all."
"On the Boat."
"The boy next to me covers his eyes not to see the waves.
He falls under our feet.
A pregnant woman vomits, starts screaming,
screams all night long.
Below deck, people shout.
They can't breathe.
The men go down and start beating them.
Tonight's searchlights, crazed sword slashing sky,
can't find us in the dark."
"Testimony."
I started out of fishermen, learned to make boats.
An Egyptian taught me how.
Open the shop, sold parasols and chairs, nets, bait, and wire.
Then someone wanted a dinghy, a zodiac.
I ordered a dozen from China.
Load capacity, strength of material,
it's all in the booklet, I say.
Long before the Arabs, Phoenicians,
Romans old and new, from spear to jet fighter wars,
this jetty has been here.
Boats filled with people and goods
loaded and sailed off, the next day, week,
or month the beaches are littered with the corpses.
I help gather them, dig graves, recite
the Fatiha over their souls, nothing else I need to know."
"Into The Sea."
"Barely out of the jetty, the boat rises with every wave,
and in the back two or three fall into the sea.
At sunset the boat starts to lose air,
fills with water, mothers and babies fall into the sea.
One side stays afloat.
We cling to a rope, water up to our belly and people
fall into the sea.
All night we grip and bleed.
Rain so cold, waves five stories high.
If only I could fall into the sea.
Sunrise, a helicopter.
I find a red shirt, wave it to them.
They watch us fall into the sea.
They fling a small inflatable boat.
I am too weak to reach it.
Others try and fall into the sea.
A cargo boat throws a rope, get us on board.
Alive at last, and we still fall into the sea."
"Wave Checkpoint and Doom--
The Roads We Tread."
"Each day a ragged plastic cup and people
will forget how to die.
The way lost befriends lament to a fog heavy with wings.
Far away somewhere, I have a brother
or a sister in this world.
My blessing comes."
"The Affari."
The Business.
"Someone reaping land, trading it
for a 4x4 or a shipload of gasoline
each body delivered or shipped.
Something to the smuggler, the rescue worker, the boat
mechanics, truck driver, salesman, food exporters,
tire repairman, money changers, doctors, and medicine men.
For each house torn down or blown up,
each bullet-riddled school, each clinic built,
detention center overran.
Something to peacekeeper, terrorist, jet-drone bombing
him.
A salary, a stipend, a grant, a loan, a fellowship."
"Democracy At Work."
"A city council meeting.
An elected official says, no need for a sewage treatment
plant.
The stench unbearable, the city knee deep in its own raw filth,
the sea will take it.
The sea will clean the refuse of life.
When has the sea refused?"
"Constance Song."
"The hands of your kin, pits of desire for the pain of others,
oh poet friend.
Flooding, pounding, prodding, scalding human flesh, oh poet
friend.
Is this the legacy of your great and noble revolt, oh poet
friend?"
"Song For Amadou."
Have you made it to Sicily, Amadou?
Are you deep in the woods of Denmark learn
to read, writing your book?
Have they put you on a plane home, Amadou, kidnapped you,
sent you back to that camp in Bani Walid,
slaving day and night on a farm for some cook?
Are you in paradise now, Amadou, a skeleton
bleaching in the sand, a bloated corpse on a sunny resort?
"The Mortician's Testimony."
"You take a tissue sample and fingerprints if intact,
note distinct features or marks.
Some have clothes on them with IDs
or passports in their pockets, or the crew
bring documents in plastic bags snatched like dead jellyfish
drifting on the sea.
You match face with photo, you bring the priest and the Imam.
No one is going home.
Sometimes there is no match.
That's when I seek their places of birth on the app
and recite weight, height, and gender, age, tattoos,
and scars.
It is to my Lord, to my Lord the antemortem, that I pray."
You've also heard about incidents
of slavery, which is an extension of all
of that human trafficking.
With lines taken from Walt Whitman from
"I Sing The Body Electric."
"The auctioneer in militia fatigues
pushes you aside to conduct his business.
He has 12 lined up.
Of the bonds, fees, threats, and the quintillion beneficiaries,
the revolving cycle of birth, poverty, and abuse
truly and steadily erode.
He knows nothing or pretends.
Or how they ended up in his hands
and whence they go, only his small part in the trade.
And of the cunning tendons and nerves
under the glare of searchlight beams,
how will they swim the pool of labor's excess?
Nothing or pretends.
What building site or garment floor, no time to be stripped,
flecks of breast muscle, plant, back bone, good-sized arms
and legs where they had been tasered, slashed,
and whipped that you may see them, nothing or pretends.
But witness you note how the living eyes map the faces,
acumen stripped.
'Brothers, we have no time,' he says.
Spare him talk of countless immortal lives
in parlors and lecture rooms across rich republics
and Frontex states.
He knows within there, one's blood, same old blood,
how easily it spills, how evidence is hidden, drained.
Whatever the bidders bid, none of your brothers
will exceed 100 quid."
"From Palermo."
"One day will be money on either side.
Someone want cargo arrive safe.
Someone calculate actuarials, potential return.
A dozen girls give you a quote.
Here now no one say I make you pay if cargo is killed."
"From Valetta in Malta."
"Will you make enough money from the boat business, Affari,
to bribe the refinery in the next town?
Give us a call.
We issue port of origin papers, unload phantom contents
in friendly ports, wire fee to account.
Best is Cyprus, next Dubai."
"From Zuwara."
Italians will take the boat.
But the captain, how much he worth?
Ride along a few miles, hand boat over, Sudanese cook.
Some hours, and you kiss sleeping toddler
waiting your return."
Psalm.
What is a mere grazer to the world
of the many and contending?
To the jealous ones of this Earth dying
grass, what do them?
What do time and limb spent this far,
the mind voracious, its calculus ablaze.
Constance [? Song." ?] Day and night
travel to reach these shores--
west to north, east to north, north
to north to north to north to north to north, your country,
your savage country, where you and I are free."
"Psalm."
"A fistful of myrrh in his left hand,
and his [? wight's ?] ascent is the bennu's flight.
His voice a thread buried in sand,
a fluorescent light inflaming a sky gleaming with ink.
He'll be pure and I will stand an inexplicable glyph waiting
to be assigned.
Measure now your heart's contraband--
all that's delved between us.
Measure it in blood.
Tell the mind to disband what it's accounted for
and disavowed."
"Camp Testimony."
"Don't fear the look in their eyes.
You stink just as they, but you're a lock
in the prison of their lives.
And pay and pay they must.
But when will you leave this trade in death?
So many bodies so much life, this snot of unsorted dreaming.
Now the sea is calm again.
Bats circle the tangerine grove riding the sultry breeze.
Time to send another boat perhaps.
And what's her name?
Constance or Blessing, the one paying her fare in bed.
She'll be there when you return.
"Psalm of the Deportee."
"Between privilege and pity, a paradise of tolerable
solitude, a checkpoint at a hope that slides,
the traveler is cornered at last.
Voice encased in thirst, his body
is midnight, past spirit and cup."
"Malouk's Song."
This is the last one in the pieces.
"Lampedusa a hundred leagues now.
The bay between it and Sousse, a corridor of debris,
a Phoenician graveyard.
Are we prepared for the storm's paradise?
The starlings recite the zodiacs on their wings;
the marabouts must in kindness abide.
On the wireless the noises of rescue--
a blink of unconsciousness and disuse--
into a theater of salvation we ride.
We are exalted into some hippopotamus,
our mouths checked, hands gloved with inhuman skin,
the fingers inside.
Their faces that speak covered like Tuaregs, their eyes
swathed with a dusky mirage.
Our names taken, flicker like fireflies.
Looped around our wrists numbers that look like a kind of price.
The bull horns cry, the seagulls deride.
On the bridges of those slippery words,
we are wrapped in gold foil, disease-free.
Who is saving whom?
The question's not stated, only implied."