In Her Feminine Sign Read online

  In Her Feminine Sign

  Also by Dunya Mikhail

  available from New Directions

  The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq

  The Iraqi Nights

  Fifteen Iraqi Poets (editor)

  Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea

  The War Works Hard

  Copyright © 2019 by Dunya Mikhail

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1454) in 2019

  Book design and typesetting by Eileen Baumgartner

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mikhail, Dunya, 1965– author.

  Title: In her feminine sign / Dunya Mikhail.

  Other titles: Poems. Selections. English

  Description: New York : New Directions, 2019. | “A New Directions paperbook original.” | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019011201 | ISBN 9780811228763 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PJ7846.I392 A2 2019 | DDC 892.7/16—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011201

  eISBN: 9780811228770

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  ndbooks.com

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  The Tied Circle The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign

  Song Inside a Fossil

  Baghdad in Detroit

  Plastic Death

  Nisaba

  Salwa

  Eva Whose Shadow Is a Swan

  Three Women

  My Grandmother’s Grave

  100 Years of Sleep

  My Poem Will Not Save You

  Tablets II

  III

  IV

  V

  T/here What We Carry to Mars

  Ama-ar-gi

  That Place

  Black and White

  The War in Colors

  N ن

  On the Edge of a Mass Grave

  On Ground Zero

  The Others

  Drawing

  Flamingo

  Rotation

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Author’s Note

  I wrote these poems from right to left and from left to right, in Arabic and in English. I didn’t translate them; I only wrote them twice. Writing these poems in two languages maybe makes a new “original.” This process somehow liberated me from having to follow the first text, particularly when the second text came first, given the cultural connotation. To capture the poem in two lives is to mirror my exile, with all of its possibilities and risks. But as home is flashed through exile, a poem is sometimes born on the tip of another tongue.

  It was annoying to me in the beginning when my poem pulled me right and left, but I always follow my poetry, just as people say to “follow your heart.” Well, to justify my choice, I would claim that allowing such a dialogue between the two texts is democratic, and even hopeful that East and West may meet in that crossing line between two languages. But this is not to say that I’ve achieved a linguistic utopia. To produce a text in two languages is to always hold a mirror to the first text while the mirror behaves as if that text is actually her mirror. The poet is at home in both texts, yet she remains a stranger. This English edition shows readers one side of the mirror.

  The Tied Circle

  The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign

  Everything has gender

  in Arabic:

  History is male.

  Fiction is female.

  Dream is male.

  Wish is female.

  Feminine words are followed

  by a circle with two dots over it.

  They call this symbol “the tied circle,”

  knotted with wishes

  which come true only when forgotten

  or replaced by the wishes of others.

  In the town of tied wishes

  people feel great anticipation

  because a stranger will arrive

  today in her feminine sign.

  Someone says he saw her

  two dots glittering,

  refuting another’s vision

  of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness.

  So scary, he says, how the moon

  hides in her red circle.

  Everyone is busy today

  listing wishes on pieces

  of paper they’ll give to the wind.

  When the stranger finds them

  on her way, she’ll collect them

  and adorn them to her circle,

  tossing off some old wishes

  to make space for the new.

  They say the dropped ones

  will come true.

  The stranger’s lateness

  worries those who wait.

  Someone says she’s searching

  for a word to complete

  a special sentence,

  the gift she’ll bring to town.

  Another wonders if she seeks

  a verb or a noun,

  and offers to find her.

  A third warns that the stranger

  may turn him, with one touch,

  into a flower that blooms

  for only an instant

  before it withers and dies,

  her circle throbbing with songs

  that cause sadness and elation

  and something so obscure

  no one has a name for it.

  Will she complete a verb

  or a noun phrase—or go solo,

  a word complete on its own?

  They wonder.

  When they finally hear footsteps,

  they know the stranger must be near.

  Make sure the gate is open,

  they remind one another.

  They hear clinking—

  A bracelet? A chain?

  Song Inside a Fossil

  She’s still looking

  down at her baby

  after 4,800 years.

  Her fossil has the curve

  of mothers telling

  endless stories in the dark.

  There were three birds

  in the cage, she says.

  Two died of poisoned water.

  Though birds don’t know

  what poison means,

  the survivor has the memory

  of thirst and of two silent birds.

  If birds’ memories are circles, a line

  must bisect them, tracing their migration

  to places that are neither homelands nor exiles.

  But what if the world, for birds,

  is all exile, till they leave it behind?

  The day her baby came into the world,

  she carried water to him in her voice.

  She
sung so close, he could hear

  her heart beat like a bass drum.

  He won’t remember the seeds

  her words scatter, but won’t forget

  the debris of what was shattered

  from every wingbeat recalling her.

  Birds don’t know

  what coming to this world means,

  but the bird who survived sings.

  Is it an elegy for the two silent birds,

  or a way of coming back to life?

  Their circular embrace is

  a song inside a fossil,

  life in a cage.

  Baghdad in Detroit

  On the Fourth of July

  here in Detroit

  I hear the echo of Baghdad explosions.

  They say it is the sound of fireworks.

  Song by song

  I scatter my birds

  away from the fog of smoke.

  They say it is ordinary clouds in the sky.

  A butterfly from the Tigris shore

  alights on my hand.

  No bombs today to scare her away.

  They say this is the Detroit River.

  I enter a shelter

  with the others in the crowd.

  We will leave at the end of the raid.

  They say this is the tunnel to Canada.

  Plastic Death

  In my childhood

  in Baghdad

  we played dead:

  we killed each other

  with plastic weapons.

  We lay on the floor,

  still as corpses

  for a minute

  or two.

  Then one of us laughed,

  exposing our plastic death;

  we held each other

  as the dying might

  life itself, but rose

  to play another game.

  The years turn over

  and Baghdad recedes

  with our childhoods

  into exile.

  From afar, we see children

  who look like we did.

  They kill each other,

  lie motionless

  on the floor.

  But none of them laugh

  or hold life

  and rise.

  Nisaba

  How shall I call you

  when you have one hundred names?

  I say Nisaba

  and I mean praises for the little things,

  I mean the big things, or rather

  the little things with their big shadows:

  the number to round off

  the killed ones to zero

  the chalk held by a girl

  who draws for the world

  a circle with everyone inside

  the open wings

  over the fires

  the soft moss

  briefly visible

  through the river

  like the faces of the absentees

  the comma between

  death and life

  the everyday practice

  of the doctor

  with the stethoscope

  pressed against a chest

  the blue flower

  in Novalis’s dream.

  Salwa

  She has no map,

  only songs for places

  she will cross and forget.

  She hums in secret

  and when words don’t come

  she borrows the rhythm of the road,

  fast and slow.

  The birds understand.

  They answer in secret, too.

  She doesn’t care much

  about transformations

  between day and night

  although she’s puzzled

  and amazed by the moon,

  how it passes her by

  like a train disappearing

  with its passengers

  until it stops at the last station,

  alone at last.

  She waits for no one.

  History is dried blood

  in her lipstick.

  She applies it now

  to kill the moment

  or beautify it a little.

  She knows the time

  from the way the roses bend,

  from the farness or nearness of the sky,

  from the dryness in her hands.

  When she tires

  of wandering,

  she sits in the shade

  and with her little stick,

  she draws on the earth’s floor

  the face of someone

  she doesn’t know.

  Eva Whose Shadow Is a Swan

  The day we met in Babylon

  for me to interpret her,

  Eva found a pocket stone

  she’d later add to her collection

  of stones from different cities

  she kept in a glass bowl.

  We strolled roadsides

  piled with rocks blasted

  from bridges and buildings

  now bent and cratered,

  yet I like to think that stone

  might have predated the fall of Babylon,

  when people spoke one language.

  I liked Eva’s musical tone.

  She said, I am from Stockholm,

  home to no war for two hundred years.

  I am from Baghdad, I replied,

  a city we call the “home of peace,”

  though war has lived in it

  for two hundred years.

  We exchanged postcards

  for thirty years before my East

  and her West met in London,

  our friendship needing

  no umbrellas in the rain.

  I waited for her impatiently

  but hid on a whim behind a pillar,

  admiring her poise

  as she approached

  and scanned the passersby,

  like Noah in search of the Ark.

  A woman nearly ninety,

  so beautiful,

  her shadow a swan,

  a goddess who found

  her lost universe in the last minute.

  She hiked an island mountain

  on the way to our meeting

  and bought a CD

  of ferry music for me.

  When I followed up

  with a farewell call, I learned

  she’d lost her hearing:

  Write, so I can hear you.

  She must have read my lips—

  the concert we attended

  in the rain must have seemed

  like lightning without thunder.

  When I receive her postcard,

  I can’t read her handwriting

  but plan to search the dictionary

  of Babylon for her words

  and decipher the line drawn by time.

  Three Women

  Another night on the way to the cages

  and the stars—dead eggs glistening—

  don’t know the secret of the stone.

  For ten years the stone was left

  in the basement with the three

  kidnapped women inside it.

  Their souls broke the door and escaped.

  Their bodies lagged a few steps behind.

  They will never look back.

  If they do, they will find their feathers

  scattered everywhere, and a bell

  with no ring, and three shadows

  trapped inside a stone.

  My Grandmother’s Grave

&nbs
p; When my grandmother died

  I thought, She can’t die again.

  Everything in her life

  happened once and forever:

  her bed on our roof,

  the battle of good and evil in her tales,

  her black clothes,

  her mourning for her daughter

  killed by headaches,

  the rosary beads and her murmur,

  Forgive us our sins,

  her empty vase from the Ottoman time,

  her braid, each hair a history.

  The Sumerians were first,

  their dreams inscribed in clay tablets.

  They drew palms, the dates

  ripening before their sorrows.

  They drew an eye to chase evil

  away from their city.

  They drew circles and prayed for them:

  a drop of water

  a sun

  a moon

  a wheel spinning faster than Earth.

  They begged, O gods, don’t die and leave us alone.

  Over the tower of Babel,

  light is exile, blurred,

  its codes crumbs of songs

  leftover for the birds.

  More naked emperors

  passed by the Tigris

  and more ships…

  the river full

  of crowns

  helmets

  books

  dead fish,

  and on the Euphrates

  corpse-lilies float.

  Every minute a new hole formed

  in the body of the ship.

  The clouds descended on us

  war by war,

  picked up our years,

  our hanging gardens,

  and flew away like storks.

  We said nothing worse could come.

  Then the barbarians arrived

  at the mother of two springs.

  They broke my grandmother’s grave—my clay tablet.

  They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes

  were wide open

  sunflowers

  watching the fragments of our first dreams

  for a lifetime.

  My hand brushes the map

  as if rubbing an old scar.

  100 Years of Sleep

  I don’t want to be the princess.

  I only want to be her sleep