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which we thought we’d left behind.

      We closed our eyes and prayed,

      knees sunk into the soft sand,

      our ears trembling like bats,

      our lives translucent geckoes

      with irregular pulse;

      but after the ceremony,

      after the rituals were done,

      we could do nothing but push on, northwards.

      At dusk of another day our heads

      were heavy: overripe fruit, chapped lips,

      hungry hearts and thirsty hands,

      and we fell to treachery,

      clasping knives in unknown ways

      Reading Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’

      for S. Ben-Tov

      Afternoon sun of Ohio’s August

      daubs the classroom with early rust.

      Eight of us bristle, apprenticed

      to nail the world to its sentence.

      Poet’s poet, our teacher hands us

      a copy each of Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’.

      A chill creeps in me as she reads.

      From Heaney-soil, that concrete dark,

      an unseen ash-fork staked in bog:

      my first portents of winter north.

      *

      We have all heard the name

      but not Heaney’s Great Chain of Verbs.

      We stall. And do not fathom

      the quiet mesh of kesh and loaning

      that lull and push of middle-voice

      that verb say

      the long-grained never static

      of the poem’s non-finite aesthetic

      Walking home with Mandelstam

      Bowling Green, Ohio

      This sky placates no single crag;

      no rock, no stone, but sods that lie

      ploughed and turned and hard and black.

      Snow patters like stars on my hood.

      My breath is yours from Leningrad,

      Osip, barefoot, walking ahead.

      Crows rise against the falling flakes.

      Underfoot, fresh snow crunches like flak

      in black-and-white films with battleships.

      Learning to walk the ice comes slow

      like permanent revolutions

      in their cold glut of time,

      but I know I am walking home

      through second snow

      with Osip Mandelstam.

      Mingus

      Orange was the colour of her dress

      then silk-blue too fast run fields

      flit flit flit cymbal-rapid the horn

      flicks to slow down rumble drum tinkling

      roll like laughter to a steady field

      through field there’s a waltz in there

      role snare stop then the flowers fall

      through her eyes dress flicks languid the

      bass here my heart throbs throbs then

      thrums and peeks a mouse my hand beneath

      the dress orange against the no silk-blue sky

      floats like a fair when I die

      happy-go-lucky us folk we cannot shake

      the sadness of her dress bass like a fish

      under my skin the horn swings one-eighty

      degrees the world gone wild like

      the shadow of her dress spinning over me

      bright polythene to the sky we hang

      like litter from the fence bass bass stumble

      swing free horn page through me finger

      finger swing finger

      touch the tender root of history

      Stars of stone

      Today the stones I know will nick

      our skulls, then knock our souls

      from us. It is so. For under stars

      that are but burning stone,

      we held each other. Named for light,

      Nurbibi clung to me, her back

      against the flat roof of my house

      warding off earth, hanging

      under heaven. Face-down,

      I gripped her shoulders, smelled

      the stone roof through the rug.

      Nurbibi may have stared

      over my shoulder at the stars,

      those burning bits of far-off stone.

      And she may have seen four men’s eyes

      hanging above us in their own,

      unmoving flame. Eyes of stone,

      heads shrouded in swathes

      of scripture. So I, Turyalai,

      am bound. And on my knees.

      And Nurbibi, in whose loins I sought

      some God, is now almost at one

      with earth, buried to her waist

      next to me. We wait

      for the seekers of God

      and their ceremony of the stone.

      Men we do not know will come

      and let stone speak, first in whispers

      then in what they must believe

      a chattering of angels

      when the crowd erupts and rocks arc

      but in parabolas far short

      of reaching God, that must return

      to earth. Men who do not know us.

      Men who cannot know

      that even as we wronged my wife,

      in union we created God. In come-cries

      caught in the throat, we made Him.

      And made Him ours, gave Him some voice

      even as He was in the still of night

      as He is now, inchoate

      before the hard and burning stars.

      Turyalai and Nurbibi were accused of adultery and stoned to death by the Taliban in November 1996.

      Southbound: leaving Chicago by Greyhound

      I’m back here, interfaced

      With a dead phosphorescence;

      The whole town smells

      Like the world’s oldest anger.

      – Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘Fog Galleon’

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