☀ Today's Poem: Excerpt from "Borderlines" Vénus Khoury-Ghata

1

It was Elsewhere
it was yesterday
the father's anger overturned the house
we would hide behind the dunes to shred his shouting
the Mediterranean prowled around us like a dog circling a beggar
the mother called us until sunset

it should have been beautiful and it was merely sad
gardens departed this life more slowly than men
we would eat our sorrow down to the last drop then
belch it in splinters in the face of the cold
the sun's spirit kept the sun from warming us
a sun that eventually ran dry from so much concentration
It was elsewhere
it was a very long time ago
tired of calling us the mother left the earth to enter the earth
seen from above she looked like a pebble
seen from below she looked like a flaking pine-cone
sometimes she wept in sobs that made the foliage tremble
life, we cried out to her, is a straight line of noises
death an empty circle
outside there is winter
the death of a sparrow has blackened the snow

But nothing consoled her
who is the night among all nights? she asked the owl
but the owl doesn't think
the owl knows
We would think about her every day
then once a week
then once a year
In the sole photo found between two bills her hair
was yellow sepia
The dead age like paper

2

It could only have been elsewhere
my father and the sun overturned the country
men who came from the wounded side of the river knocked on our borders
I say men so as not to say locusts
I say locusts so as not to say fetuses of straw
their hands had the sourness of corn
their breath had the bitterness of cypress trees
they arrived at night
arrived every night of every month
dragging their houses on leashes
their children planted at the foot of their olive trees
in her dark cupboard my mother counted their steps
counted the wing-casings of their rustling bodies
my mother sympathized
their tongues thickened by the salt of the Dead Sea
their throats filled with the wind of Galilee
they dug their trenches in our bedrooms
stretched their rifles out in our beds
squatted our sidewalks for the length of a man's life
for the length of shame
their torpor, once they were dead, did not follow them
their torpor continued to doze facing our houses invaded by a nameless vegetarian
as high as their mosques
as silent as our churches carved in the slopes of valleys
Visible through the washing on our clotheslines, their country turns its back on them
we keep its cast-off noises
some leftover snow walking more quickly than men do
more slowly than cemeteries