Essays    Reportage    Marginalia    Interviews    Poetry    Fiction    Videos    Everything   
Afterlife Diptych

In the gentle pull of the first light, / we hobble to stand our bodies / ours and wanting

Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, Riham Yacoub, poetry
September 28, 2021

In the voice of Riham Yacoub

I.

And the morning after we woke up
wedged in shrubs of myrtle, our half-legs
flapping like windsocks from mounted poles; the face
of a pupil-less god behind us. God—we began, no longer
starved with the urgency of the living—god
of water, of electricity, of rooftop sleep
in summer’s unend, what remains there?
There,
in what we have left
of Basra’s glutted sky. Why
did you not come to us as you come to others:
in sleep?
In the gentle pull of the first light,
we hobble to stand our bodies
ours and wanting—

II.

I was a marbled teal bobbing
in the unnamed water
when I was neither dead nor alive, I preferred it
to this sterile heaven
to this revolving concert of faces.
Nearby, Fouad Salem hums
don’t come to us
don’t.
The neighbor’s son scrapes resin
from bambar trees, asks me to help him search
for kites of palm spines and thread. What spooled blessings.
What terror
in the small lives we no longer live.