January 2006

Two Poems by Khaled Mattawa
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Genealogy of Fire

by Khaled Mattawa

Photograph by Amanda Abel

My sister held an old piece of bread.

She pointed to the fungus growing on it

and told my mother

"This is how we began."

My mother was a planet

in search of an explanation,

and my sister an idea

hoping to plant itself in the dirt.

As you can imagine

they didn't get along too well.

If I were to say

take these embers and carry them

in your hands, use a rag for help ... would you?

Let's not hypothesize,

and ask for feats that happen without volition.

An astrologer in Arabic is a falaki.

He or she watches stars swim in the falak.

And falak is the word for star

for orbit

for sky.

So my sister worries about her children.

She spanks them,

hates to hear them criticized.

They are orbits, stars, heavens.

And if that is motherhood, and because

a woman gets into her white car

and the world is full of white cars

and they always disappear like comets

on unfathomable orbits,

birth must be a machine

that braids chance and bird call,

a wave on whose fluctuations

street sounds and mysteries float.

I was born in a hot country,

hot most of the time. Dusty.

The water tasted of salt

and the sun turned our skins

into the color of fading bruises.

In the winter the rooms were cold

and we slept under many blankets

and huddled when we were awake

and blew breath into our hands

when teachers hit us with their bamboo sticks.

My sister's daughter

tosses her book aside.

A budding galaxy,

a swirl of centuries of ecstasy and torment,

she no longer wants to be

the next Simone Weil.

"I shall put on flesh," she declares,

the refrigerator handle in her grasp.

When my mother is alone in a room

she begins rocking.

When she does not know the answer to a question

she rocks three times.

When she falls asleep she curses

all those who make more than breathing sounds.

Night is long in her night,

the day a sickle,

the moon high high, and rain

eventually destroys a man's house

who has nothing but a cat that meows.

My sister's school was named after a holy woman.

The first wife of the prophet.

The classrooms were the prophet's tears.

Weep with me now that I have children

who have grown thin and tall like irises,

like corn stalks. Winds will blow at them

and the world will choke them.

Varicose veins and late night laundry.

Sadness happily rendered penetrates their music,

an unarmed robber, a potter careful

about keeping the oven clean.

Sisterhood, daughterhood

and the myriad arabesques of water.

She saved her wage money,

all of it, and bought herself some land.

And if she were, and if they were

hast thou not seen how the day

peels itself from the dark

to wake in the swamps of night,

hast thou not seen how the moon wanders

traversing among her mansions,

the air cool and smooth as satin,

hast thou not seen her return like a withered branch

every dust mote a little star,

and if she were, and if they were

knowst thou not how we paired thee

to disappear like fog at sunrise

knowst thou not how we multiply thee

on crowded roads or dead gardens,

and still thou returneth to me a bare single soul

and if her voice, and if their voices

were to be swallowed by the sounds

peace unto me the day I was born

of forests or shifting dunes,

peace upon me the day I die

how will I console the world?

the day I am raised …

For Years I've Been Prohibited From Mentioning the Moon

by Khaled Mattawa

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So now the cedar-scented moon, and moon-

glow encasing the sky in lavender velvet,

clouds splotched on a moon-radiant sky

and a sickle moon raking a field of violets

and the moon and sun in Joseph's dream kneeling,

and how years ago we could've been on the moon

watching the city from an airplane,

the stadium lights a diamond necklace,

and she was there, a star singing,

but we wished to be back on earth to know

the measure of our loss, to see

a star singing, her voice drifting beyond

a necklace of light filling the city's dim streets.

How many times, though for years I've been barred

from mentioning the moon, how many times

have I switched off the lights to gaze at the sky,

the moon full or receding, holding court,

how the breeze itself changed the light,

how I wanted to weep at the sight of the moon rising

from the hills of Indiana brightening a frozen stream?

How many times have I turned into this subdivision,

the pipes stacked like a tangle of pythons,

the fire hydrant, tall as a man, exposed, its lower pipes

to be buried under pavement and sick lawns?

I know this hour, the thick lament to come,

the thousands churned. I know this laughter

tearing at my lungs, because seeing the moon

is no consolation for what was to be lost.

But here's what really happens: I see the moon

surrounded by the rubble of conquest

where there are only old stars and dead wolves,

and I am moved again by something I felt before,

shaken, but without an atom of pity in my body,

filled with a transparency capable of bearing

the whole world, a void that takes in the moon

in the sky, the pipes and the evil they gush,

and the poisoned water, and the lead-laced dirt.

Only the moon and whatever spins within me

as I worship all that remains, each speck of light,

every crooked ray beaming from my chest.

[In the notes section, Mattawa explains that the italicized lines in "Genealogy of Fire" are from the Quran. Both poems are in his 2003 collection Zodiac of Echoes, Ausable Press, Keene, NY; $14 softcover, $24 hardcover. Ordering information is available at http://www.ausablepress.org/c_mattawa.html or through Amazon—Ed.]

Khaled Mattawa, assistant professor of English and head of the poetry section of the MFA in Creative Writing program, was born in 1962 in Benghazi, Libya. In 1979, he emigrated to the United States and lived in the South for many years, finishing high school in Louisiana. He has said of that experience, "People now are aware of how difficult it is for people of Arab descent to live in this country, but it was never easy. And I went to high school here, which was not an easy experience, in Louisiana."

He completed bachelors degrees in political science and economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and went on to earn an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where he also taught creative writing. He joined U-M's faculty in winter 2004.

Widely anthologized, the author of two volumes of his own poetry and the recipient of numerous awards, Mattawa is renowned as perhaps the leading translator of Arab poetry into English. As Leila Abu-Saba, a writer at Mills College, noted during Mattawa recent visit to that campus: "Adrienne Rich has spoken with admiration of his translations of the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, and just [this fall] the New Yorker published his translation of three poems by the Syrian poet Adonis. He is furthermore a prolific and energetic advocate for Arab-American literature. His use of English strikes me as unusually rich, luminous yet spare, strange and yet familiar; I heard resonances of Arabic in the searing images and lush word choice. He has done a great deal to add Arab writers to the shelves of American literature."

Mattawa is the president of RAWI, the Radius of Arab Writers Inc. This year, he looks forward to directing a pioneering creative writing workshop in Bahrain for Arab speakers from around the world.

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