'Grief Builds A Settlement Inside You' - New Poem By Carolina Edeid

Annotations for a Memorial

BY CAROLINA EBEID

Something so light

almost nothing

Not a list of violences

nor reports from beauty

One person looks up

& then another after

another looking

up in the same direction

Who took this picture of Fight ghost town

this is Palestine

graffitied in Hebron (al-Khalil)?

Who wrote, “they bring that desert stuff to our world”?

My father writes on my wall:

I remember these birds, they used to fly by

the thousands to the wheat fields,

we called them zarzour in Arabic

It begins to waste

like a bar of soap

turned in your hand,

the repeated word

(the boy spins into a curtain)

(whirl-like smoke)

(bewitchingly out of the mouth)

Grief builds a settlement inside you

When Eric played the album of abnormal heart sounds

recorded for medical students, I felt sorry

And how the brain can’t hold an archive

of every sound you’d like to hear again

You could listen by holding your hand to your ear

Grief will probably

redraft your whole

anatomy:

harbour opens from the chest —

a cargo ship drifting out,

seen & tracked by a satellite

Source: Poetry (September 2018)

***

Carolina Ebeid was born to Palestinian and Cuban parents and grew up in West New York, New Jersey

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