Ghazal: Morning


Do you remember those mornings we couldn’t even morning?
All our verbs were hard-edged, we sharpened our teeth on the morning.

Morbid girls untangling from ancestral lines: a pathway rigid
Like the tracks of the fabled Ottoman railway exploding in the morning.

In our Hijaz, girls grew from crescent to crescent.
The night was a banned café we filled with cigarettes until morning.

So many words for fragrant smoke. I recall a gilt wedding tray filled
With crystal jars of oud & the tale of a friend asleep on her prayer rug by morning.

Some of us wed. Some of us left that Hijaz. Some of us are lost in western
Mothertongue. The western side of the world spins you clockwise at morning.

Over many rooftops the world glitters for us, in a sky bereft of ancestors.
Name the stars. Stars, name the girls who rise to sing new prayers to the morning.



My Girls & I

& yes i know that stray dogs enter the compound in the dark and sit on the swing & yes i have seen their oblong eyes juiced in meditative silence & yes sometimes i join them


Terraces

He did not tell me he eyed the new satellite /
and imagined rolling him in the /
valleys of his fingers.