Embedded Files
Appeared in Fikra Magazine, 21 March 2024
To the Atlantic God of Carnage
Pick up my limbs
like wet oysters
on the bloodied
Atlantic shorelines,
collect my parts
on the waterlines
of war vessels
mighty and cold.
Like wind I spread
an intermittent whisper
of frothy foam
over the waves
like a bleeding cloud,
sticky and damp,
in a heavens
of flesh and bones.
With broken wings
I come to you, a child
solemn and black
I come to your shorelines,
a corpse
a dirty cloth,
a blood bundle
of my remains.
God of carnage,
I beseech thee:
I cannot be unborn
I will not be bottled
I will not be rubbed
an obedient
enslaved genie.
I will not be
trapped in a lamp.
I come to you
ten thousand
burned children,
I come to you
on a gold plate,
I stand again
at your closed gate
and I wait,
I will wait and wait
and I will sing
with the children
of the Native
Americans
and the children
of Africans
and all those
you have enslaved;
the extinct tiger
the utter madness
in the bones of white men
the white colonies,
the raw skeletons,
the elements of valleys
and coarse mountains,
the elements
of the raging
bull of Wall Street
and the pissing
Petit Julien
of grey Brussels.
I cannot be unborn
I will not be bottled
I will not be rubbed
an obedient
enslaved genie.
I will not be
trapped in a lamp.
A flapping flock
of dry bloodstains
on white canvas
I fly to you,
my mother’s screams
on TV screens
my father’s burned face
on the covers of magazines,
I come to you
like bloodied breakfast
cereal with morning news
like a dead turkey
in Thanksgiving
like the echoes of carnage
chiming with Christmas hymns
in the White House’s
hall of no shame.
I come to you
and I won’t wait
for the dead word
of the white masters
of “the free world”
drunk and arrogant,
greedy and ignorant,
lulling the old
dormant conscience
into mass graves
with a cold kiss
putrid and stoned
from the foul mouth
of crossbones.
In a bottle I float
towards your shorelines
a Sufi song
tall and serene,
a whirling gown,
solemn and white,
a swaddled newborn,
a white caped darwish
in a coffin.
Bury me now
in memory
know me as
a wild nightmare:
I cannot be unborn
I will not be bottled
I will not be rubbed
an obedient
enslaved genie.
I will not be
trapped in a lamp.
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