Poem
Omar Sakr
[Y]our people [Y]our problems
I have never had a country
willing to claim me as its own.
Sit with me as I sit with that.
Hold my hand. Our knees can touch
across the loneliness, which, at least
and at last, wants nothing of us.
I heard a man and a woman have a public
spat. Both saying the same thing:
Your people, your problems. Conditions
of a birth marking conditions of a life
much like the colony itself, or is it the other
way around? Isn’t it perverse how we are
never taught to love. Colony only sees problems.
Colony disposes, dispossesses, destroys.
Colony is nobody’s friend. Sit with me
as I sit with that: O vast empty, I’m trying
to see you true. Colony cruels the world
and the world, sca[r]red, heaves into rack.
Fellow flotsam, what makes a person a
person? The animals are asking.
Friends, what makes a citizen a
citizen? The people are barking.
Fiends, what makes a nation a
nation? The massacred know
imagined borders conjure murders.
I consider this from within my box.
Schrödinger’s poet, dead and alive,
a sweet, stupid rhetorical device:
the box is brimming full of ghosts
and the splendour of seedless soil.
Isn’t potential grand? Like a mother
who is yet to [b]eat her child,
a language yet to be [for]gotten,
or a body never [dis]placed. Sit—
[w]here? Where can we sit without
being moved, without being monstered?
What is a song worth singing here?
The silenced are listening.
What is a life worth living?
The caged want to know—and I, I confess
though free, desire to be freer.
Sit with me as I sit with that, the [g]all.
What is an hour well houred? I abhor
both leisure and labour when I learn
everything carries a cost, every minute
must be accounted for, and extracted
from a pound of flesh. Despite this
my knees buckle for a fresh [car]rot,
the wet crunch of it & my muscles long
to ache, to grow, to slow, to age—
I want to say near a mountain or a river,
somewhere flagless, uncountried
where I can say I am a hue, a being
a living breathing sea, immovable
& uncrossable, water calling to water,
a body still, host to a kin[der] universe—
you know, a sweet lie, something close
to true, but history has proven
I will do anything for a hunk of hard cheese
going green, even writing verses
for people who want to remember
how good they are, or were, or could be
as the[ir] country disposes of others.
Sit with me, please, in the rising waters
as I sit with that.
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