Fady Joudah || Two Poems

Fady Joudah || 

Two Poems

  Sleeping Trees

Between what should and what should not be
Everything is liable to explode. Many times
I was told who has no land has no sea. My father
Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story
Of a sycamore tree he used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain.
 
Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being
Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.
 
My brother believed bad dreams could kill
A man in his sleep, he insisted
We wake my father from his muffled screams
On the night of the day he took us to see his village.
No longer his village he found his tree amputated.
Between one falling and the next
 
There’s a weightless state. There was a woman
Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree
In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand.
When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew
Could turn anyone into one-half reptile.
I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being
 
The only one left. When we woke my father
He was running away from soldiers. Now
He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs
About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king
And tried not to stop. He flew
But mother woke him and held him for an hour,
 
Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward.
Maybe if I had just said it.
Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe
I don’t know much about dreams
But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead
Know about the dying and sometimes
Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree
My father used to climb
 
When he was young to watch the rain stream,
And he would gently swing.


SOURCE
***

The Tea and Sage Poem

At a desk made of glass,
In a glass walled-room
With red airport carpet,
 
An officer asked
My father for fingerprints,
And my father refused,
 
So another offered him tea
And he sipped it. The teacup
Template for fingerprints.
 
My father says, it was just
Hot water with a bag.
My father says, in his country,
 
Because the earth knows
The scent of history,
It gave the people sage.
 
I like my tea with sage
From my mother’s garden,
Next to the snapdragons
 
She calls fishmouths
Coming out for air. A remedy
For stomach pains she keeps
 
In the kitchen where
She always sings.
First, she is Hagar
 
Boiling water
Where tea is loosened.
Then she drops
 
In it a pinch of sage
And lets it sit a while.
She tells a story:
 
The groom arrives late
To his wedding
Wearing only one shoe.
 
The bride asks him
About the shoe. He tells her
He lost it while jumping
 
Over a house-wall.
Breaking away from soldiers.
She asks:
 
Tea with sage
Or tea with mint?
 
With sage, he says,
Sweet scent, bitter tongue.
She makes it, he drinks.


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Vivian Eden || WANDERING JEWS

Vivian Eden ||

WANDERING JEWS

            
Uncle Mendel, who had hair like
David Ben Gurion, was a payntner,
walls, not pictures. Afraid
of heights, he wouldn't climb ladders
or paint above the second floor. In New York.
 
Short on dollars, he saved a dime.
One Jewish New Year, Roish Hashona,
Mendel circled around the very big table
(eight aunts, eight uncles and Zaydeh remained),
dunking the one teabag into seventeen
yahrzeit glasses, not china cups,
of freshly boiled water.
 
Eppis, gezint, nu, takkeh, schoin
they'd chatter, and clink the glasses,
after dinner, Lishona toiva tikasevu,
as the younger cousins played team-tag
in English in the second-floor apartment
that smelled of mothballs and kasha,
keeping strictly out of The Boarder's room
while the older cousins
“went out for a walk,”
coming back smelling of smoke.
 
Aunt Rosie, who had hair like
Golda Meir, took in foster kids,
ninety of them in forty years. One made
money – In business? In crime? – died
young and left her a legacy in his will
 
so with bundles of kosher pots (dairy, not meat),
teabags and kasha, Rose and Mendel wandered,
by ship, not plane: Liverpool, Lisbon, Gibraltar,
Haifa, Marseilles, Buenos Aires and back.
Eppis, gezint, nu, takkeh, schoin,
Lishona toiva tikasevu.
*

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