Poem of the Week: Tarfia Faizullah

 

                      

Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh       

.......for Meherunnessa Chowdhury, 1924-2010   

i.

In Grandmother's house,

we are each a room that

must remain locked. Inside

it, a prayer mat carelessly

folded on a low table, as

though hands that once

pressed down on it are not

below ground. Who has

stripped bare the white

walls of the black velvet

tapestry depicting Ka'bah,

house of God? I let in

the netherworld. Something

rose from underneath. I sit,

wait through my cousin's

sobs. This morning, another

sudden loss: a classmate's

death, she says. Sordid

details flare out like sails

of a ship: mother trapped

in an asylum, father weeping,

son's warm body cradled

in his arms, bone still lodged

in his young throat. To whom

would this not be an inelegant

death--a caught bone, too

much like one of our own?

ii.

We leave the city as

we entered it: cloaked

in fog, lightbulbs,

lanterns, blurred gold--

the rumbling traffic

on the highways,

and the silent traffic

of ghosts. I reach

for my mother's

hand like a child.

Here hang the years . . .

they sleep with folded

wings. Already my

body begins to shed

each jagged dirt road,

bodies jostled inside each

swerving car, trains draped

with bodies dangling

like writhing vines--

iii.

The cars, packed tight,

do not move. I saw

the image of an image

of a man coming

forward . . . sudden

as starlight, he lifts

an arm: mere bone,

wrapped in brown

skin, stem of an iris

rotting in water. He

taps the glass. I close

my eyes, see his arm

trapped in a young

boy's throat. It is still

beautiful to hear the heart,

but often the shadow

seems more real than

the body. How small

the distance between

the world and the world:

a few layers of muscle

and fat, a sheet wrapped

around a corpse: glass

so easily ground into sand.

-Tarfia Faizullah         

Used by permission.

Originally appeared in The Missouri Review. 

Tarfia Faizullah's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University's creative writing program, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Margaret Bridgman scholarship, a Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor fellowship, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the Asian American Literary Review and Trans-Portal.  

  
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