The Stone Serpent

In 1878, archaeologists in South Shields, England, discovered a tombstone inscribed in both Latin and Aramaic, dating back to Roman Britain. The finding led them to piece together the story of Barates, a Palmyran cloth merchant who sailed to Roman Britain (circa 2 CE), where he freed Regina, a woman from the Catuvellauni tribe, married her, and, after her death, erected the tombstone in her memory. Nouri al-Jarrah’s Stone Serpent draws on this story, and is written in part in the voice of Barates, whose memory of Regina is fragmented—an ankle here, a braid there—and who speaks, at times, in the subjunctive, as though unsure of whether the relationship had ever been real: “You could have been / mine / with spindle and wool.” There is an indistinct, dispersed quality to the grief evoked in these poems, as if grief itself has been eroded by the elements:

the mist devours stones, and walls, and wanders
over the river
and those who dropped from forts, pelted with
hatchets and axes,
fell into the pit of winter.

Originally from Syria, al-Jarrah has been in exile in Britain for over two decades, and his circumstance may have some bearing on the spectral sense of place in these poems: “The act of creating a void is a skill more ancient than the act of construction.”

In addition to Barates and Regina, we encounter Caracalla, the Roman emperor of Arab descent, and an unnamed member of the Celtic tribe, the “Painted Warrior,” who emerges from the forest smeared with dyes from Palmyra, routed through the Silk Road:

From the sumac tree, sister of the trees of the rocky ground, we brought back glowing yellow dye […] until the mountaineer descends with lapis lazuli / to fill your face, shoulders, and ankles with colour.

Translated from Arabic by Catherinem Cobham, Stone Serpent reads like an archive of characters and languages that show up in unexpected places; poems that dream of insurgent histories are a reminder that the void is also full of possibility.