Untitled I

Waking dream, call to Prayer

Hallucinations of your breath giving me air.

After years, a mended heart beats

Between layers of skin and bones that won’t quite meet;

Beats the rhythm of the city outside

The paper windowpanes where millions once died,

And have been buried or dried in the unforgiving sands

Beneath the same sun that warms our homeland.

I think of you here among the yellowing tombs where

Children are mourned and born and the air

Hardly moves.  I know you once walked

Your feet among these copper pots and bits of trash and you talked

Your mouth to the men holding tubes in their jaws

About the meaning of god and the writing of his Laws

With your face turned upwards to the oxidized gray—

Puff and sigh—smoke ring memory floats away.

We used to talk of picture book places far

From the bucket seated, frosted windowed car

You drove me home in, crunching the ice,

Leaving tracks of mountainside mud in winding slices

On the road leading to my dark house where

Nothing seemed to change. The leaves turned and fell, the air

Barely ruffled as they floated to the ground

I waited on, hoping silence would turn to sound.

The nights when we talked of our plans—our pain—

We dreamed of our futures (separate, yet always the same).

We looked at the city below blinking and bright

And you marveled at the beauty of electric burning lights

I knew you’d leave: first love barely come and already lost.

I had heard, even then, what they said about rolling stones and moss;

But I would have stayed for you, followed you, done

Just about any or all, to wake every morning to the next sun.

Years later, my feet have walked the same miles

Stood on the same stretch of street overlooking the Nile—

The history here, longer even than the road

Stretching between the adolescent hands we used to hold

Without ever touching skin to skin to skin.

Here, between the governments and monuments, among the dirt and the din

I can’t help but remember your eyes when you

Finally said – too little too late to really be true.