Mukoli

Four Poems

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Now There is No Door

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for Abu Omar, Aleppo, 2016
(Photograph by Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)

Who doesn’t love an open window?
But now the drape, pane’s amiss.
The nephew hand-turns a grinder by the sink,
last few beans of coffee, he smuggled
upstairs, in his shirt. Memory’s a brew.
A bruise. Let the scent call for morning.
Nothing fills the basket by the door.
Forgive me. Now. There is no door.
Some sounds lock the mind—
some unhinge. But this tune,
unexpected, strange and familiar,
ivy-twining up the splintered struts
of the long-gone wall.
The old man still living there
cranking the gramophone,
out-blasting war with song.
Starts the bird inside, knocking
itself against ribs. Listen. 
How the refrain resounds amid
frameless windows in Aleppo, one spring,
singing of love in the senselessness.  

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Not Knowing

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If the eclipse heralds a message,
how many pairs of eyes burned 
to read the sky before a wise one 
said: Turn from eye-scald, listen  
to the nearer darkness, its off-beat  
in your chest. Not all that covers  
maligns, not all that outlines sears. 
He scattered words  
with an elbow-fling  
worthy of Millet.   
Generations of night, day, toil, 
unexplicated tumult, followed. 
I ask myself what to read 
in the night sky, what to hear 
from within my tunic, and what  
to toss into the wind. Picture me, 
mid-stride in half-light, my linen bag, 
stitched by hand, shoulder slung. 

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The Problem of Evil

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Turning to it, we’re farmers 
digging with a toe, the heel of a boot, 
until a stranger tilts us a shovel, 
a pick and hoe, a plough, dray horse,  
combustion engine. 
Oh for a goat to eat grass. 
What was Quixote without a goatherd. 
And Sancho. And us. Progeny. 
Readers, now ready, armed  
with a broom pole, a bowl for a helmet,  
blinking. What it must take to laugh 
at Darkness, the one war we’ll win. 
These are, I promise you, 
the same tools with which we weep. 
Lance, basin, all we can claim: 
A broken steed called Rocinante, a friend. 

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Not Everything Known is Remembered 

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She said my pockets heaped like yard sale jumbles;  
she’d shake them out each night onto the spread,  
before stories, before bed. I hiked a hand-carved leopard  
to softball, brought the Magi into peace talks  
with GI Joe. My lunchbox stowaways  
(refugees for the refugee) confused:  
a chessboard knight, that wren’s nest, empty,  
puzzle pieces of snow, rescued  
from an attic-stranded box,  
Yerevan in Winter, a place I didn’t know.  
If left unsupervised, I wore two different shoes. 
You were my odd one, my mother said, 
singing something low, a catch from a song, 
she told me I once knew.

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