Thank you to Michal Goldman for turning me on to Iman Mersal's poetry. I was able to attend a reading at Brookline Booksmith last week, at which Iman read this poem in Arabic, followed by a friend who read the translation by Robin Creswell.
They tear down my family home
by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Creswell
As if sledgehammers weren't enough
the demolition men use their hands
to tear down the window jinn used to flit through
and with a kick the back door is gone. Its memory is gone.
Underfoot I feel the remains of the sugarloaves, oranges, and mangoes
our furtive visitors hid under their black shawls.
They would come after evening prayer, the hems of their long gallabiyas
brushing across the threshold of the back door,
a door of gifts and sorceresses, now a door to nowhere.
The roof that never protected my childhood from the delta rains
has reverted to its old self--a few trees you can count on one hand.
Now they're tearing down her old bedroom, casting into the air
strands of her still-wet hair, hair that flies up from the cracks
of earthen walls about to become clods of dirt,
as if no one had ever rested their back there.
Did my mother bathe before bed or at dawn?
Did she pull her hair from the comb's teeth to ward off
the evil eye, or fire, or the stratagems of neighbors?
My mother's hair slips away like a gift, or retribution.
What ties me to her now?
I donated her dresses to charity because they didn't fit me.
If we met, I'd be her older sister.
What ties me to her now?
Her womb is with her in the ground--there
under the camphor tree, where early death is close enough to touch with your hand.
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