Rebirth after a medical procedure

Rebirth after a medical procedure

‘We are not born all at once, but by bits’. (Mary Antin)

The child comes out of sedation

Tottering like a new-born calf.

In this new world the air is gel

And her spine is water.

She drawls on ‘mummy’,

attempts to say, don’t leave me.

Because you left her earlier

in the hands of strange men in white coats;

all by herself in an unfamiliar room

where machines flickered and droned.

She remembers, she remembers,

and looks at you to say, you betrayed me.

You abandoned me to the machines.

She is being born into un-speckled light.

You watch as she lifts an eyelid, a finger.

She tries to sit and flops like a worm.

You catch her before her body thinks the thought.

Old neural pathways are re-fired.

Mother reflexes dulled by time

reawaken with alacrity.

She comes into wakefulness like a transitional species:

part arthropod and part vertebrate,

bendy at strange angles.

Slowly, slowly, she evolves a spinal chord

Slowly, slowly, she grows a tongue

Speech emerges.

‘Mummy’, she says without slurring,

‘Take me home’.

A whole sentence running like a brook;

no, a holy river drowning you with relief.

You wheelchair her to the car.

And it feels like you have been back

from the rivers of Babylon.

You could not sing then.

But now you whistle through hospital corridors

like a pirate on a seized ship.

She is your catch, your prize.

She is a legend.

Un-forsaking with a poem from Hargeysa

Dear Blog,

It has been far too long. Let's not count the months or list the reasons why. The important thing is that I am back. The poem below is part of a body of work reflecting on experiences and relationships in Somaliland. 

Cadriyad

This is the story of how a meal becomes a journey.

This story marks the beginning of a new hunger

to feed on journeys and words accompanying them

The first time I saw Hodan’s baby boy

she served me sweetened vermicelli

while we waited for him to awake.

The breeze whispered in the soft light.

The snack had hints of cardamom and anise.

It sat on my tongue with hesitation.

I embraced its taste slowly.

It journeyed into my heart, and I

journeyed into my friend’s life:

She told me about fleeing Mogadishu

fearing for her little brother, tasting fear,

smelling blood; big empty nights, tears.

Depending on the generosity of strangers

Her father died.

She was only nine.

I walked with her through Lower Shabelle

Galkacyo, and on to Hargeisa.

Before we sat together that day,

eating Somali sweets,

I could not have imagined the wounds she doesn’t show;

the scars she tends in silence.

The baby awoke. We admired

His fat cheeks, his chubby legs.

He is a joharad; a son of Somaliland.

Hodan told me about the night

she saw the snake’s green stone.

I didn’t  believe the story of Joharad;

yet I do believe.

I believe it walks the sandy streets of Hargeisa;

It is in camel herders in the plains,

Sheep keepers in Sheikh

Poets and dancers.

It is in mothers putting their children to sleep

And friends sharing a meal.

I believe in this sweetness discovered on a sleepy

afternoon in Hargeisa. 

Sheber

This is a response to Michael Onsando's Kinstukuroi

Sheber

Some people accidentally drop hearts.

For others, once they have unmade a thing,

possibility is alluring;

becomes a source of power.

Evil finds a home.

We are made of dust, but are not clay.

The last wishes of a book

This poem was written for Jackie Karuti's exhibition at the Goethe Institut. The Exhibition is titled 'Where books go to die', and is a follow up of the art performance in 2013 titled, 'In the case of books'.

Last wishes

When I die, please don’t preserve me spotless.

Refrain from sending me into a corner,

to remain unsullied and untouched.

When I am done, don’t put me in a box in the attic

for a grandchild to discover decades later

and mull over what memories and scandals

I have overheard; what whispered secrets I have sealed.

I have never doubted that you love me.

Curiosity overcame you the day you first heard my name,

and morphed into something like a passion.

You sent a friend across the sea to find me and bring me home.

You finger my spine and feel the current as pages turn,

smile and remember the places we went,

and then put me back in my place.

It is not you. It is me. I want more.

I want you to cast me into a web of hungry hands:

send me onto the street to inhale the dust and sweat of workers;

into a hospice to absorb the thoughts of the dying;

send me into a public library for a jobless man to find;

put me into the hands of a homeless mother to keep warm;

let me die a second, third, fourth death,

in the hands of others.

Anything but that shelf where no one comes,

or, worse, where they might come, Oh and Ah,

and walk away without feeling

as if I were a shark in an aquarium;

as if I were a sacred island where only priests go.

This is a plea against cages of wood and glass and metal.

Set me free to be held against a fifth, a sixth, a seventh bosom;

to hear the rustle of grass and leaves in a park as I gaze

into famished eyes; to become damp with the moist breath

of a reader who falls asleep with me on her face

and in her dreams; to be felt and stained and absorbed

over and over and over and over till I crumble into dust.