loose strife [Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings]
By Quan Barry
Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there.
The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see
the meaning in their hands,
palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them
by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe
and His consort, but there were stories
of travelers lost in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and a distant
brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters
your body after it has been
snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school
hundreds of miles away all the girls my age were poisoned,
and last week outside the capital
a woman like my sister was shot dead in front of a crowd by two men
who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel
so they could kill her
and be done with it. After the visitors were blasted I had a dream.
I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him
directly. His image
on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world.
In my dream the man said, “Thousands of lifetimes ago
when my body was cut
into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.”
Then in my dream someone picked up a rock and I woke up.
It took almost a month,
the great heads drilled with holes, then anti-aircraft tanks rolled in.
Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us,
like a person. Before it happened
we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven?
Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven
but in exile.
Copyright Credit: Quan Barry, "loose strife [Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings]" from loose strife. Copyright © 2015 by Quan Barry. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: loose strife (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)