October’s stealth light
leavens the skin
then molts into Nuttall Oaks.
No preamble to a scream
interrupts the glistening rub
of downward wings
except for the hum
of poets acquainted with one another.
The one made of bronze
cools the day’s fire from their breaths,
so that news of faraway
places lifts briefly,
and in this afternoon
there are no bodies scraped
from deformed fans in Kashmir
nor children gushing out
of cemented pipes in Gaza.
For a small wrinkle,
the women of Tahrir
caress dragonflies with their fingertips
and flood the tank’s tenuous arm
with bracelets of jasmine.
The dormant fountain
in the garden
is only an ode
to the sea
but not shadows
as we toll
through a penultimate line
proclaiming the time was neither wrong nor right.
Deema K. Shehabi
Deema K. Shehabi is a poet, writer, and editor. Deema is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (PM Press), for which she received the Northern California Book Award's NCBR Recognition Award. She is also co-author of Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker. Her two plays “Light not Touched by Fire” and “A Handful of White Petals” were performed by the Arabian Shakespeare Company’s New Works Festival, and she is the winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018.
