'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)

 

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