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among other things

jarri heydar

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To Amma, who grew me up and taught me how to hold a pencil.

To Abba, who taught me how to walk again.

Perhaps this could have stayed unstated,

Had our words turned to other things

Vikram Seth

Cover Story: I would like to gratefully acknowledge the effort of Ramsha Usman, who

had to be coaxed, cajoled (and pleaded with) into harnessing her amazing media skills to

make a cover for this chapbook. Since my poems often make very little sense to her, she

was intent upon representing only the touching phrases from the poems into a dense

chunk, punctuated by fractal patterns drawn from Pinterest (yes, we all have to resort to

this ultimately). The result was an original, yet dignified image.

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Table of Contents

God of Green ... 4

The Art of War 6

The Lost Prophet .. 8

The Crows ..10

The Women .. 11

I am here .12

4

God of Green

Between the tick of today, and the tock

of tomorrow, that time when swallows in trees

have only just arrived home, and are almost quiet:

For the sky is a confusing shade, locked between the emerald

of leaves and the blue of eternal slumber; hold yourself awhile,

set apart your thoughts, like columns in a temple,

turn breathing into an art, and then

Whisper a prayer

Let each word drip

like water into a well, slipping

from the edges of your chalice filled to the brim

with doubt and despair; encircle the air

twice, and with your hands held aloft,

suspend the night shawl from each end of the sky;

Banish the confusion in the absence of stars

and when all the world is a single colour

Whisper a prayer

Let each word take root

like the oldest magnolia in your own yard

that sets the sun behind it each evening;

5

Let old birds be your sentinels, and young ones

be your kingdom; send them out then

at the crack of each dawn to sing the city

back to life, to lull it to sleep when the day is done;

When your eyes are aching, rake back

the sweet arc of your neck and

Whisper a prayer

To the God of Green, build

an altar in the farthest corner

of the mind and from the thorns of the morning-rose

make him a crown and an offering

of Dianas tears: Patron Saint of all your fears,

He will summon the morning tomorrow,

And there will be light, and there will be light

inside dim-lit skulls, overgrown with weeds,

And there will be life at the end

of every hopeless branch, every end-stopped sentence;

If only, you were to raise your lips

To the underside of every leaf,

if only you were to

Whisper a prayer.

6

The Art of War On the dinner-table we draw out lines, limits, and brinks between the four of us; two progenitors and two progenies. Then one of us says the word: a battle-cry and we begin conversation, at first tumbling smoothly over trivial details and then gaining speed from unuttered trivialities. Throats heavy, mouths hardly able to surround the sharpened delicacy of appropriate insults, and hardened notions tempted for decades and half-centuries in cradles and shared beds. We charge, knives and forks at the ready, cutting languid strokes into unwilling flesh: the chicken here is too bland, and that also is an accusation, an insinuation of hostile intent. The clutter of words is almost as thick as the air now layered with memoried pathos, and the painful recognition of familiar jawlines on these familiar faces contorting into familiar grief.

7

We cannot fight anymore. The clock strikes ten. We must now make our peace before the next time one of us feels a shapeless lump forming in that chamber of the heart where we store an ancient familial disease.

8

The Lost Prophet Call me Ishmael, and Ill call you Hagar No water, mother, for miles afar Daddys left us in this plain alone And you, mother dear, are without the scar Of god-fathered purity What to do, what to do? Theres all this airless divinity to woo And you, mother dear, are a dried river Of scalding dust; my feet beshrew This damning pagan heat. Shall I move beyond this then? This rhyme restricts me to how and when The water sprouted, and time stood in awe Of the time-worn precision of this, and of men Like my father roaming as hoary miracles: God in one hand, infinity in the other I shall never know why he chose you, mother You who were common as a thread-bare scroll Resting paper-thin and awaiting the smother Of oblivion; forgive this I never shall

9

You are guilty mother, I say this now Unnatural, witch-hound, deformed prow Impinging as an afterthought on this valiant ship Of Israel; gentile blood besieges my brow I am alas as much your son And now my story is almost done Almost finished, this business has run For long enough in my streets, in my veins Insidious yet unplaced, like the Meccan sun Creeping into hollow rooms of my naked houses Which remind me now of what exactly? Yes, it was your womb, mother: slatternly And dust-lined, even holding a prophets seed Could not overturn. And now I lead With this nomads staff, a people Lost. Mother, I am alas as much your son The lost prophet, his story undone.

10

The Crows Crows are rational, love is not Swallows die too often here Songbirds here are left to rot For birdsong here has come to naught In calming doubt or fear Of loss, or extrication free of blot From this sojourn that has me caught By the hair, and dragged to where They stretch souls across like taut Tarpaulin made to bar each jot Of light; they let inside no air Lest lonely birds should learn to knot A garden full of nightshade wrought With poison enough to overbear A cupful of life, each happy lot Must once refuse whats always sought Instead of doubt or fear For crows are rational, love is not And song-birds here are left to rot.

11

The Women On the street that opens to let in the day there walk these women with uncertain eyes and lips that curve a certain way to let the passer-by know hed be wise not to ask one home for lunch, or worse dinner; food to be had at a table, with friends, or without, is irrelevant to this inner turmoil: for she provokes the night through the lens of her glass, tipped towards the sky: her every movement eats time like a python swallowing prey; the why in her questions dissolves like chyme your appetite, your wonder, for women like her who accept your proposal without demur.

12

I am here I place my head upon the rails to hear the train on the Other side; I listen intently each vibration: help me help me help me please, Three clear tones repeat themselves But only in the echo chamber Of inane chatter So I place my head elsewhere This time I plant my feet firmly in a dense forest of words: I sift through the undergrowth of adjectives bleeding moss-green chlorophyll, pretending to be leaves, and the leaves themselves sing three clear notes of disapproval: tisk tisk tisk they say So I place my head elsewhere Now I sink my head under water: I taste direction, sole-thoughted, like Lauras gaze directing Petrarchs steps or the Indus racing swiftly into the arms of the Arabian sea, whispering to the earth and irrelevantly to me in three clear notes of devoted madness

13

So I place my head elsewhere In a vacuum now, as a concrete object resting placidly inside this room as chutnified desire; as soap or toothbrush, desk or chair, a quite commute from here to there reign in these threads into a portrait, and you will have dared to disturb the universe in three clear ways But I must place my head elsewhere Some place untouched by lightening stroke, unmarked by ruin, and devoid of you reminding me and pointing fingers at the gaping holes in my breathe-sized villanelles; the mind cannot survive and neither can the throat, what may instead be simply put In three clear words.