For Rahima Saadi Mohammed Shaheen, Age 0

 


The sharp angles of your elbows

& rounded knees, rendered

In data set. We tell ourselves numbers

Rather than names. Iterations

Of sameness that practice the cold

Clarity of something like inevitability. 

A numerical plain resists interruption

By dandelion, say, or by shrieking

Merlin, crying child, pleas floated

Unto updrafts, hopes in sonic blast. 

What, Rahima, was your number? 

6,547? What was the timbre of your

Voice, passing syllable from cheek 

To cheek like a ruby, like a candy? 

Where were you when your father

Loved you in sudden shock & his 

Eyes shifted & stayed? There are 535

Members of Congress here, Rahima,

& there are zero laws delimiting

The scope of your death. It is

Permissible, encouraged. My country

Spent 23 billion dollars to erase you

From yourself. From your father’s arms. 

You are yet a human child. I pull

Your name from the columns that

Engineer our antiseptic distances.

I sing it this morning, with love. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...
Read more

Map & Shadow

What is perhaps most truly odd is the peculiar & myopic requirement that someone we love die in order for us to most fully consider the implications of dying at all. Our lives seem delineated by deaths, as all lives are, with only eventual reprieve from its immediacy permitting our days to banner & hang catenary from one obituary to the next. We pivot from immersion in all of death’s details back to our own lives & weigh them anew & wonder how best to recalibrate, to impose new bearings. My own life here a sort of waiting in tow with our compass already set, the days reduced to logistical tinkering & finger-tapping & imagining again through the landscape I so dearly miss.  We have oscillated regarding how best to position the kids in the world. We tried Montana in hopes that we could abide what sacrifices we sought in ourselves in a kind of exchange for the possibility of more cultural exposure for them. & then every weekend we fled into the mountains, a...
Read more

A Bit More From Bettles

  We have walked upon the taut & shifting crest of the wave, as from some far sea, compass-lost, the din of ocean-swell underfoot & the brocade of stars flung in reflection from trough back to sky. The horizon was a muted thing, a blur between grey & grey, flashing matte color like a starling in shade. One thinks of life as wanting, as tending toward rest, as if once unburdened of the velocities that buoy & compel us, its roots would writhe into Reason & its flowering would pull in the scented breath of the world. I have wondered at this, & been given cause to often. I tumble as much through space as I do through time. We are given to understand them both as linear, but they grow to enwreathe me, a kind of bird’s nest wherein the bend of having been sits across the diameter & sees itself grown longer, run wild, tucked between past & future. I think about ending up here, in Alaska again, in this town of twenty or so that felt instantaneously familiar....
Read more