HOMECOMING

after Abu Bakr Sadiq

summer drapes juniper-purple sunsetswith hypnotic stripes of gold latched to the bottomless sweep of sky. so much has happened around here. now it’s too late to smuggle my people’s dead

bodies from the chokehold of death and bestow them a spare life. after a quiet walk through a deserted neighborhood we turned a corner, on our right was a dead land with the crumbled

charred remains of a tiny village. tuft of blackened roofless walls sprouting here and there like scattered toys among the rocks. beyond the bullet-scarred walls was a vast span of sky swathed

in smothers of red and purple, heaven-kissing mountains like jagged teeth and a relic of what would have been a pomegranate tree—we’d climb it, straddle at its branches, our naked feet

dangling, drapped sunlight flickering through the leaves and casting on our faces, a mosaic of light and shadows. somewhere over those mountains slept the city that might as well be in

another galaxy to people sleeping on the opposite ends of history where nothing grows but death. somewhere over there a man from my dreams had died a needless death. ummi tells me that the

silhouette fastened to a leafless branch of the wilted lifeless tree, the dried bloodstain i had seen strewn across the bullet-scarred walls came from the bodies i had run kites with over these

lands. by which she means, the lives of my friends had drifted from them like windblown kites we’d chased. by which she means,she might be dead before nightfall and the boredom of the day

will be broken. i confess, i am a lone body sliding down a steep cliff, clutching at shrubs and tangles of branches and coming up empty-handed. homecoming was like bumping into an old,

forgotten friend and seeing that life hasn’t been so kind to him. i scroll through my Twitter feed & my people are being killed again. on the news on tv, my people tried cascading themselves into

God’s hands but the bullets outpaced them. tell me, how pious does one have to be to end up having one’s prayers bitten by bullets? perhaps if it’d been otherwise, the trees would still be

here, blooming. and not wilting as they bloom. and the houses too, breathing and bubbling with laughter. maybe i won’t be here in this city where every/body is an hourglass sinking into graves.

i wish i don’t have to empty every bit of their deaths into poems and bury them between every line, rhythm and metre. this is to say i have become an author of grief

i paused

a trio of crows exchange a few caws

in the distance—underneath the bony glow of a half-moon in a starless night seeking new ways to spread itself above land—the muezzin calls for Maghrib

Judge’s Comment

This is a masterfully executed poem, with very deeply symbolic images. This poem has several layers of meaning that ought to be delicately distilled.