Self-Made Pride in Withstanding Erasure

Appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, 18th anniverary issue, March 2025 

Self-made pride in withstanding erasure

I. Before the moonless night could break its fast,
my uncle and I bit the morning dew, yawning;

the scant threads of light scented the sacred land
and the cocky roosters graced the rhythm
of the clomping hooves cracking the dawn
on the cobblestones to the tobacco field;

along the winding road, you could hear the walls
echo the beat and rhyme with the peasant’s
pride that made my veins well up and pulsate.

A farmer of imperative verbs, this uncle
called monosyllabic words at the horse,
all morning he said not a word while we

were both bent on stripping tobacco leaves
off the stalks, extracting my hands black, sticky
and tarred, shrouded with premature adolescence.

He heaved the leaves onto the cart while I
climbed fig trees, just before the sun could rise,
and picked fresh figs, soft and tender like baby’s hands;

back at my aunt’s house, I could smell the baked
bread, fried eggs and olive oil, as we piled the leaves
for nephews and nieces to string them merrily

on long threads and hang them to dry, high,
close by the dark roof, on their way to the state
monopoly that governed the net worth
of all present and absent native lives.

II. I was barely eleven years and wore
the harvest-pride that only peasants wear
when I became aware of father’s stolen

pride, bereft of his village and farming fields,
despite his Ottoman land-ownership deeds,
(yellow, withered, folded carefully, wrapped
in burlap bags of farming memories);

bereft of farming nouns, deprived of verbs
of choice, he became a mason, a wright,
and taught me the pride of being self-made;

I had followed in his footsteps for years,
hammering vacation days to masons’ calendars,
cementing walls, casting labour and sweat

into wooden caskets, fleshing out
the rusted iron skeletons with wet
cement concoctions; when the cement cured

we removed the wood to reveal a new
cubicle, delivered to newcomers:
cementing the occupation of our land.

III. Sometime later, my uncle was bereft
of his land and spent his days ploughing roads
of tar for new settlements through olive groves;

my uncle and father withered away
and spent their lives wanting the peasants’ pride
I had ever felt pounding in my veins,
on a morning that has yet to return.

VI. Now I live in the verbs of forced-exile
and sojourn in the nouns of a homeland
erased, bereft of every native noun;

I am a farmer, but I have no fields.
A mason, but I use no stones. I seek
the self-made pride of native artisans.