Refugees, circa 926 - International Publication Prize, in the Atlanta Review, Dec 2017
(This poem is one of a series of three poems.)
(This poem is one of a series of three poems.)
Refugees, circa 926
The boat is too small for so
many
and only the twin babies sleep,
drunk on milk and swaddled
tight
rocking against their mother
as the men row hard into familiar
waters
of the Gulf of Hormuz for the
last time,
the starlight on the receding
mountains
dimming fast until what is
left
of this new moon night is the
abiding
light from their holy fire,
fed carefully
by their priest with sticks
of sandalwood
pulled from deep in his white
robes, as he looks east
into the black Arabian sea.
All the joy and blood that
had come before already turning to myth,
he counts how many
generations it takes to go
from conqueror to refugee.
Gold bangles ring out as the
baby girls are given
to their grandmother, then
great grandmother,
and passed back to their mother,
seventeen,
back erect, hair like molten
copper
fawn brown eyes flecked with
green,
hiding tiger, quick to anger,
as quick to forgive the every
day abuses girls
seem not to know they carry.
The father, twenty-five, son
of a farmer
named after his father’s
father, and he his,
the same names reaching back
into old Persian towns
winding up a river into
orchards,
where they planned this winter
voyage,
had four boats in sight
ahead,
and six behind him,
but now they are hidden by
night
as they row with speed, the
wind still,
the vessels arrows through the
air.
So, when tired eyes stir with
the new dawn
and the babies tug with
little hands to drink,
steam from their breath
against her chest,
their mother lifts her head
as the men cry “Land!”
she does not expect rose
petal beach, like silk shivering before her.
She pulls herself to her
knees to look
at this land at the waters
edge that shifts and stirs
as if it is made of wings
disturbed by the coming of her people
only to gasp, as flocks of long
limbed flamingos
rise up into the sky and scatter,
revealing a sanctuary of white
beach.
