I The Night
The moon peers through haze
like a woman’s
gaze through the meshThe moon peers through haze
of her veil. At this hour, none show themselves -- except a cat
wandering
through the stench and stone rubble
hungering for
refuge, scraps. Her whinepermeates the neighborhood
with fumes left from the day’s fighting.
In a house
where the staircase leads
to an attic
room, a child lies breathinginto a plastic cup -- stuffed with coal and cotton. An elastic cord
bridles his face and keeps the mask attached.
In the corner,
his father weeps
grasping a
string of wooden beads. Its tasselblack as the hair of the woman
he buried. Her slender body
turned right in the earth. The ties of her shroud -- unfastened
II The Noria
A wheel famous
for its ancient use and workmanship
remains unshelled but shadowed
by despair.
In the river a
woman washes her hair
and then lets
it dry in the wind .Air which has absorbedgas and dust, the strain of hinges
holding shutters that once
locked out the heat and flies.
Breath that still carries
the ocean's salt and the ripe scentof olive trees - whose oil
feeds the brass lamp. Whose wood
crafts the polished beads
of her rosary and the Tasbih
of her neighbors.
The wheel stays motionless, the wind
does not
attempt to turnand the Damascene prays. Her fingers moist
with traces of shampoo, almost enough
for the song of a marsh wren to stick, the sun
molting along the water’s edge.
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