of cemeteries & chimney swifts
My heat goes out due to the cemetery of birds
in my chimney: feathers & bones & broken eggshells.
There was not one set of hollow bird bones but many
where they nestled in the warmth of one another’s bodies.
The wizened HVAC man shop vacs the exhaust pipe-
turned-crematorium in my house, a mass grave
& I think about my people burned in their tents,
buried at their hospitals, bombed in their buildings,
& all the GoFundMes where every dollar donated
asks, Why did you wait so long to leave?
The swifts could have flown away, gone back the way they came—
because every entrance is an exit wound by another name.
Even then, the home you know is better than the roof you don’t.
in arabic, the word for poppy is pieces
“It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, no matter how badly we treat it. It looks like the poppy will always follow, mark, and glorify our best and worst works in vivid scarlet red.” —Lia Leendertz in the BBC podcast Natural Histories’s episode on poppies
Our national flower, in accordance with the rhythm
of the land, unfurls her petals at dawn & tucks themselves
in as the sun descends. The poppies’ slumber gives meaning
to the term flower beds—entire fields given over to red oblong
wings like black-eyed peas, delicate, oscillating on spindly stems
in the desert night’s breezy sleep; blanketing the evening chill.
Scarlet soporific, haunted leaf of crushed silk, benevolent magic,
hypnotic: Not meant to be separated from their sand soil home.
Any florist will tell you they’re not good cut flowers—withering
soon after plucking. Two days in the vase at most. Any farmer
will tell you they’re weeds—an annual nuisance that can
germinate from seeds planted half a century ago.
O, to be a half-century on our land unbothered:
the dream! Anything to nestle into our earth’s bounty.
Across the sea, a Greek poet said, “They tried to bury us,
but they didn’t know we were seeds.” We are seeds thrown
to the wind, blowing along the path our grandparents ran
when death came calling & escape meant days of walking.
Which came first, the bodies or the poppies? The war
or the weapon? Which must be lost for the other
to give way? Pieces of land hold pieces of lives.
Dunams of desert harbor seeds. This I know:
In Arabic, the word for poppy is pieces &
the refuge always comes before the refugee.
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