Fifty April Years (Khaled Mattawa)
A soldier waved our bus
into a detour. We didn’t pass
by Parliament Square that day.
I’d hoped to go to a pastry shop,
coins I saved for a week.
Southern winds, sun shrouded
in dirty clouds, red tongues
of dust on windowpanes.
There’d been a hanging on the square.
Sixteen years later
I eat lunch at home,
afternoon light, the gloss
of olive oil on lettuce leaves.
On the radio, whistle and boom
of mortar shells, one landing
on a soccer field, forty boys dead.
And I’m trying to remember who wrote
“to die in mid-sentence
was to triumph over the dark.”
When I was seven
I spent days hiding
among the bean stalks. I heard
my name called and felt indifferent
to being wanted, unassured
that the world I lived in
would undo my foolish malcontent.
It’s not as dramatic now.
I look out the window,
people in their rooms, reading
or thinking, or watching TV
as if the world had stopped calling,
as if we had emerged
from the whirlpool of its demands
with a wild mixture cowardice
and courage to say unto others
“I wish you did not exist.”
On the day of the hanging,
my father drove home,
a poster of the President
on the hood of his car.
He tried to explain.
Over and over he said “survive.”
Once I believed forgetfulness
was a gift from the gods,
not an erosion of the soul.
Now I know enough to say
this has happened before,
and even crueler things—
the bombardment of the ghetto
as the republic ate its lunch
in the park, held its toddlers,
napped on lawns, smoke-sharp air
fevered with the hiss of a flute.
Don’t ask. I too find myself
listening to gurus
who abhor coherence, who tell us
language is a bucket of slop
and we can only grunt and squeal.
I wonder if they say this to silence
the wretched who have found no words,
who wave their torn limbs at us.
This too has happened before:
My brother and I snuck to the car
the night of the hangings.
We intended to tear the President’s poster.
But something held us,
not a policeman’s shadow
or the neighborhood spy.
Not even my father
who hours before
had gone to sleep.
