by Omar Sakr
be it on her back or in a butcher’s garden.
Whenever I think myself lost, my unworked foot
recalls hers, tunes in, a struck bell to loss &
I wait, how I wait, to hear it ring.
Meaning
for George Abraham
I am tired of summoning my heritage out of a battered magician’s hat.
Yaani, there are times I reach for history and come up empty.
Yaani, it feels wrong to sing for my supper with a ghost’s mouth.
Yaani, I have come to love belonging nowhere, I priest absence.
Yaani, this mo(u)rning I arranged a bouquet for my other half.
Yaani, I can multitask longing in every direction.
Yaani, when you can give directions to a stranger, you are home.
Yaani, when I planted a kiss on an Adam’s apple, I entered Eden.
Yaani, I know what it is to be expelled and fear it more than anything.
Yaani, I taste the apple anyway. I am thrown every time.
Yaani, the snake has no gender. I swallow the whole pregnant length.
Yaani, to create a garden is to make a border. Even beauty is walled.
Yaani, I refuse to make ugliness a refugee. Let them stay.
Yaani, do not draw fixed lines around my origin. I came from water.
Yaani, there are waves resonating ever outward. Forget the dirt.
Yaani, meaning Arabs are forever
transmuting tongue into ocean to say we are here.
As the Raven Flies
I have to say it as plain as possible: I left
and have returned—the prodigal ’burb
boy, son of alleys, child of salat & haram
riding in the back of a paddy wagon no
more. I was caught only once. I thought
this meant I learned from my mistakes
but here I am, back in the house I raised
hell in, and had hell raised in me, a new
and particular shaitan, a devil I helped
father. How keen we are to lay roots
in sin. I have grown in this satin sexy,
trying to perform my way out of trauma.
It’s not working. I still don’t know
who I am, though I have a perfect mask,
an approximation built in the dark
to fool everyone but myself. Whatever
I learn in the world I leave in the world
for someone else to find, or a flower.
I keep only my body, somewhat wiser
but unwilling to speak of it. I look up
the word Arab and I’m unsurprised
to find it has many meanings: desert,
nomad, merchant, raven, comprehensible—
you see why I have to say things plain
now? We are so much to so many
but the least of all to ourselves. I am
home today wherever home may be,
in sear in stone in wing in speech
and yes of course in this sweet sin,
a currency I will exchange for no other.
Great Waters Keep Moving Us
for Nathaniel Tarn
I haven’t seen it in years and I’m not sure
it still exists, an old man is known to say
at the beginning of every sentence.
There is a fire house out here, I mean
not where flame lives but the brigade
of its children, that is also a museum.
The story goes that over time firemen saved art
or enough of it to decorate their walls.
Now, in an emergency, you can see it too.
The river does nothing I am free
to tell you about. You should ask it
some day if it remains willing, able,
blue. The business of being a legend,
the poet knows, is simple: just fuck
up and flee the wreck to get good
enough perspective. Don’t stay
home or still. You can’t be rewarded
if you’re never there and lack
of reward is where poetry lives.
There is a famous church here
but it is closed for the Super Bowl,
the pigeons alone do not care.
They are perched, listening above
the suffering table. Who built it,
who? My ego is too busy to answer
but I promise to take a message
and get back to them. Can’t they see
I am assembling debris
from my survivable catastrophe
ready to build a legend.
Heaven Is a Bad Name
I can’t imagine it, whatever it is, as a place
gated. What need the spirit for doors? What god
bothers with a wall? They who should not enter
will not enter of their own accord—grace
is poison to them. And that is only if they dared
to dream of an after. Most don’t. They pray
to nothing and to nothing they will return.
This is what some of us suspect: absence
is a god, too—how could it be anything less
with so many adherents? Remaining in place
is sinful to at least one deity, I tell myself
to make leaving easier. I can’t imagine it
whatever it is, as a place with a past. Anything
with a history knows pain. Nobody holy should
remember the flesh & this is proof I have never been
holy. I keep kneeling and kissing fatherhood
lightly, just the tip of it. Heaven is a bad name
for what any man can conjure, just look
at what we keep doing here, the damage
to every kind of green, every long ecstatic
tributary. We’ve had an eternity already to love
godhood, this elaborate glamour, this throne
covered in fluttering ladybugs & all we
did was dig graves into its sides & pour
oil into its eyes & drown children in its mouth.
I can’t imagine al-Jannah, whatever it is, as a place
because then it would be real, and vulnerable.
In Order to Return
A body comes
A body goes
A religion comes
A religion goes
It would not be faith
Were it constant.
It is human
So human
To leave.
Acknowledgments
I wrote most of these poems on the lands of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation, and to their elders, I give thanks. I stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities around the world whose unceded lands are occupied, who continue to face injustice on their sovereign countries. Thank you to CreativeVictoria and to the Australia Council for the Arts, who in 2017 and 2018, respectively, provided funding that allowed me to set aside some much-needed time to write, and to the following publications that have published twenty-six of the poems in this collection: Prairie Schooner, Stilts, Wildness, Tinderbox, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Yellow Medicine Review, Island, Griffith Review, Ibis House, Meanjin, Peril, Cordite Poetry Review, The Big Black Thing: Chapter 2, Círculo de Poesía, Antic, Overland, Mizna, and Melbourne’s City of Literature office.
I would also like to thank WestWords and Varuna House for providing a space in which to work for a week alongside editor Elena Gomez, who provided valuable insights as I was assembling my manuscript. To my first readers, Philip J. Metres, Nathaniel Tarn, and Caitlin Maling, thank you for giving me the gift of your consid
eration. To my friend Lexi Alexander, without whom I could not have written “Do Not Rush,” a poem near and dear to my heart, I owe a debt I’m unsure I can repay, but nevertheless I will try. To Jericho Brown and Kaveh Akbar, two poets I have written poems to, or around, in this collection: thank you for allowing me to work with your work, and thank you for your generous guiding light in general. To my brother Najwan Darwish, who remains an unswerving beacon of poetry in my world and who I will forever cherish, I have only love. To Michael Mohammed Ahmad, thank you for appreciating what no one else appreciates and blazing the way forward for literary Lebs.
In addition, I would like to acknowledge my Turkish grandmother, Yurdanur, as well as my Lebanese grandmother, Amne, and her daughter—my aunty Jamileh—who raised me, as they all have. They are my everything. I am nothing without the incredible Muslim Arab and Turkish women in my life, who have hurt and healed me, who have loved me close and loved me distant. The poems in which I refer to them are of my life, which is to say a memory or fantasy or mix of both, not their lives. They deserve more than any poem or book could hope to give them.
To my mother, the strongest and strangest person I know . . . Ya immi, what can I say? I love you more than language can encompass. Yet every time I try to hold you in my mind, I come away burned. Burning. I am trying to welcome the scalding, trying to forgive. Did you know that to forgive means to give completely? I know I have not given enough. May God grant me the courage to have this conversation in life and not just in literature.
Lastly, to any politician who picks this up: resign. Failing that, stop bombing the Middle East, stop supporting dictators, stop arming the world in the name of war and calling it peace. Lead with kindness, or not at all.
Salaam, Omar
Omar Sakr is a bisexual Arab-Australian poet. His debut collection, These Wild Houses (2017), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His poetry has been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish in numerous journals and anthologies. He placed runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and was the 2019 recipient of the Edward Stanley Award. Omar has performed his work nationally and internationally. He lives in Sydney.
The Lost Arabs copyright © 2020 by Omar Sakr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
Andrews McMeel Publishing
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The Lost Arabs was first published in Australia in 2019 by
University of Queensland Press.
ISBN: 978-1-5248-6047-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948660
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