from The Book of Petitions
Summary
Whether it's true or false
We said to ourselves that you would continue to play dead by omission or out of laziness to distinguish you from those who walk with their backs to the city's noise that you'd offer us a bottle of sherry to celebrate the coming of a winter clad in Afghan goat's wool and boots gathered in the tombs of the rich.
Whether it's true or false
We also said to ourselves that your walled-up voice would be able to decide among us when it came to the distribution of winds in the plane-tree on the square, and to train the fireflies escaped from the sleeves of darkness to light up God's road when he came alone to check the content of his snow, and to see if passers-by slipped on his tears when he suddenly felt like weeping.
Must you be reminded that you are only what is said and Forgotten
brother of shadows calling out in the chestnut tree
sketched thought
silence chipped away by use
that the wind pushing you toward the pond is not the pond's friend, nor the friend of the washerwomen who wring you out with the red linens of women in childbirth, who complain of pebbles in their chests as their arms fall when night does
when their arms drop with darkness
Let's admit that your disappearance was a pretence
staged in complicity with the eclipse of a comic sun
that you never went far from the doorstep where you made holes in the sky with your slingshot killing angels and bluejays with one blow
only imaginary the feathers that bloodied the grey woman's hair
how to know who plucked the angel's feathers and ate the bluejay
and that what happened, happened
Let's admit that you made a bad decision
Having chosen walls with a view of other walls is no reason to speak ill of the snails in the garden and the grass that doesn't remember your name
Not the slightest echo of your consultations with the blackbird who had a crush on himself
becoming two blackbirds in the bay window
No sign either of an eventual sketch of your face
the steam rising from the soup is the image of no known soul […]
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- A Handful of Blue EarthPoems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, pp. 17 - 40Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017