Abdullah

Earthquake Türkiye-Syria

White ash ghost-masks two teenagers
live-streaming their ghoulish faces

from an underworld, slip-struck from dinner table,
Anatolian plates smashed by Arabian & Eurasian

One wrong breath gives Death a place setting
The older whispers, If you love God, save us

Another boy, his head pinned sidewards
beneath a slab that may be his bedroom wall

or someone’s pancaked floor whispers from
new-made gloom, I can’t move, my cell’s dying

Our sons, earth’s sons, so dear to us, dying
cell by cell in sudden-made cells of white dust

Al Jazeera’s news crawl reads: It cannot be
determined at this time if these have been saved

..

Earthquake Morocco, South of Marrakesh

I told my son to get a knife to cut the cake
He went into the kitchen   The collapse,

it happened   We stood on the seventh floor,
perched like pigeons over a black hole

He’s under there, do you hear?  We got to the ground
All day we dig with bare hands   We have no tools

..

Cyclone, Two Dam Breaks, Derna, Libya

Bombs, I thought, then bodies on me under me
A baby floating by in the slurry, my wet shift

stuck between my legs, nearly intact buildings
clink, whole trees drag all manner of things

I go under, pop up so many times I can only
describe to you flashes   You won’t understand

Each time I speak I, too, lose what it was,
what was, cars and houses light as balsa

I woke curled on a shelf the raging flow had cut
Weighted with sludge, I rose, a statue of Uma,

the miracle, then flesh of my stomach told
me they were dead   Why was I left alive, I cried

on that false promontory, the brown sea seemed
far away, keeping its distance, itself afraid of Derna

..

The Interrogation

Why am I not that ash-whitened boy, head stuck
in slab, whispering to widen the bandwidth for help

Why am I not that old woman who dies in the aftershock,
snow falling to whiten the insulting liquefaction of matter

Why am I not that boy who says, Baba, I’ll get the knife
Worse, the father who can never change sending his son

Why am I not the woman swept off in her sleep Why do
I not cry out, How can I live if they are dead

..

On the Beach in Derna

Young Abdullah with a rope around his boy’s waist,
his hair sea-salted, wildly curly, proffers an answer

to the reporter who asks how he copes, pulling out
bodies that only now have begun to wash back to shore

He squints as sun splints pirouette on a sea turned brown
We are god’s and to god we must return