Driving a flatbed
truck of sheep alongside the
Qalamoun hills, he
glances at the mountains and
thinks of his brothers who are
still in Kirkuk. Once
borders were porous, work meant
crossings, for those who
are amateur refugees
now, inadvertent exiles.
Two hundred miles from
the refugee camp outside
Damascus, Zainab
descends the stone ramp from Baal’s
temple, becomes her namesake
Queen Zenobia
who held off Roman legions
Sanuqawimu!
White cotton scarf round her face
like the headdress of a queen.
Her father will die
without seeing her again.
He’s ninety-four now.
Safe in exile, they watch the
insurrection in cafés.
She asks her husband
“But who’ll take power after
your revolution?”
Not exactly truth
to declare that she wasn’t:
who knew what she’d write?
But she said “No.” Nonetheless
she didn’t get the visa.
The boy’s round-faced smile,
and the image of his corpse
returned, thus tortured
have gone viral on You-Tube
and on ten thousand posters.
Internet switched off
on Friday, the day of the
week’s demonstrations.
Where’s Joumana, where’s Imân?
Eina Najîb wa Ahmad?
The telephone rings
in Reem’s apartment. And rings.
Nobody answers.
She’s gone to market, or she’s
working in the library.
Rings late at night, rings
early in the morning. Still
nobody answers.
She’s gone to her family
in the country? She has none.
Chams’ mother tells him
three soldiers knocked on her door,
asked where her son was.
—thinks of the old man she loves,
the hills near Lattakia.
Chams calls his mother
and she talks to him in code:
“It rained yesterday,
a strong cold wind from the mountains
blew down the telephone lines.
Now the power’s back.”
A You-Tube of the demo
on his Apple screen,
but not his younger brother’s
face in the tide of faces.
He is becoming
an American poet
in his ellipses
lacunae and retentions,
deceptively simple words,
but sound and structure
of his first language linger:
the root keys that can
morph, blossom into wild but
logical alternatives.
Returning at last
she requested a visa
as she’d always done.
The man at the embassy
asked “Are you a journalist?”
Military service meant
he was still in the reserves,
called back to duty.
She said he was in England.
Now he’ll have to stay.
He hadn’t planned to go back,
nor thought he was in exile.
His cousin tweets from
“Syrian Revolution,”
needs cell phones, Zip drives,
so he’s on Turkish Airlines
toward two days in Istanbul
with his French passport,
appointment with a stranger
in their first language,
feeling like a boy again,
mother tongue and contraband.
In a Damascene
pizza parlor they worked on
translations of Plath
stacking up saucers of sweet
thick coffee they drank till dusk.
A year later one
portable phone’s been cut off.
No number to call—
the now-distant friend translates
silence that’s not poetry.