For Tahany Ezz El-Din Ahmed Zoroub, Age 0

 

We spill across landscape, don’t we

Tahany? In the accidents of our birth

Geographies are conferred. I rise from

Topological thumbprint, fine green

Circles, you from flat land hemmed 

By water. The constitution

Of your soil is changing, dear girl. Earth

Swallowing rubble, root filtering blood. 

Where are you from now? What place

Is there beneath the fracture & torsion

Of what was? We sing songs 

About home, the ache in us of its loss–

Now the songs invert– the ache

Of a home instead keening for its people. 

Accident casts itself as purposeful,

Armored in notions of destiny, driven

Like sharp blade through a heart,

Faith written across the blade &

Wresting each name from each body,

The rote sustenance of divinity. Your

Name gets used this way, in service of 

Tide & time, liquidities of power. Your

Name a fulcrum now in its procession & 

Not instead signifier of your little body

Broken beneath its burden. But you

As you were briefly in the world–

All wonder & need & unworded longing–

That is our humanness, Tahany. I want

To believe that is our humanness. I

Sing your name this morning.