Recognized Futures
Turning to you, my name --
this necklace of gold, these letters
in script I cannot read,
this part of myself I long
to recognize -- falls forward
into my mouth.
You call my daily name, Lisa,
the name I've finally declared
my own, claiming a heritage
half mine: corn fields silver
in ripening haze, green music
of crickets, summer light sloping
to dusk on the Iowa farm.
This other name fills my mouth,
a taste faintly metallic,
blunt edges around which my tongue
moves tentatively: Suhair,
an old-fashioned name,
little star in the night. The second girl,
small light on a distanced horizon.
Throughout childhood this rending split:
continents moving slowly apart,
rift widening beneath taut limbs.
A contested name, a constant
longing, evening star rising mute
through the Palestine night.
Tongue cleft by impossible languages,
fragments of narrative fractured
to loss, homelands splintered
beyond bridgeless rivers,
oceans of salt.
***
From these fragments I feel
a stirring, almost imperceptible.
In the morning light these torn
lives merge: a name on your lips,
on mine, softly murmured,
mutely scripted, both real
and familiar, till I cannot
distinguish between your voice
and my silence, my words
and this wordless knowledge,
morning star rising
through lightening sky,
some music I can't quite
hear, a distant melody,
flute-like, nai through
the olives, a cardinal calling,
some possible language
all our tongues can sing.
Published in Food For Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. Ed. Joanna Kadi. (South End Press, 1994); Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women, Ed. Carol Camper (Sister Vision Press 1994); and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, ed. Maria Mazzioti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan (Penguin, 1994).
