Half-life in Exile, by Thea Abu El-Haj (USA) 2022 https://www.theaabuelhaj.com/Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.
-- Hala Alyan
-- Hala Alyan
It’s vertigo, plain and simple –
the sky spinning under my toes,
the same feet that touch
summer grass and pavement heat.
Where are you from?, they say.
We are from a house of longing, a garden
full of flowering weeds, where Persian
green, black and goldenrod meet.
Grief congeals in the lungs,
while the past coats the hips,
but it’s the shin bones that splinter
in the escape, fuse together, never quite heal.
Though you walk with a limp, the paintings
and poems rush from your fingertips.
Small shoots of caper spurge and wild carrot
emerge triumphant, weeds in name only.
It costs too much to leave the rubble,
arrive from across oceans, or even from
another side of town. From the compost pile,
improbably, roots grow toward the night sky.