Wheat Fields

at dusk the wheat fields turn into lakes of light.
 
children rise from our bodies
 

to become old women in rose pergolas. we eat the raw wheat
until I awake            into the blue desert of forgetting.
 

my dreams are white mourning clothes.
 children
rise from my body          to become houses without people.
 

in this house, fishnets lay on the table. hardened bread
 
dipped into liquid,            dusk melting into a bowl of peaches,

night the shape of a plague doctor, dawn
 
colored in a mythology of foxes—

nothing rising from my body,            this basin of lakes and weeds.  

we walk in the oil painting of autumn, in which
 
our names become salt or stars, in which
 

the bones of wheat become our hands.




Refugee

when they found your body floating like a luminous fish, 
like an anonymous dream, in a port in Libya,
 

I knew no metaphor can make the way you died poetic.
 
    
 
the world is made of water but it does not mean your name
must grow hollow in the Mediterranean Sea.
 

if you had survived, I would picture you
 
kneeling beneath a silver willow, the leaves heavy with moonlight.
 

you are learning the Portuguese concept of
 saudade, which, to you, 
means a longing for a homeland to which one has no hope
 

of returning, a longing
 
for a place that no longer exists.
 

the silver willow is growing into a field of Syrian jasmines,
 
which is the shape of your dreams buried in the sea,
 

which is the image of the Aleppo River, where your mother
 
lets you drink water from her cupped hands, where bodies
 

keep floating by and you learn how grief grows mute
 
in a mythology of fear, how a family album is written
 

in a calligraphy of blood.
 

when a child calls out to her mother in the Keleti train station,
 
his voice breaks into a poppy field burning in Afghanistan,
 

and the mother’s voice, responding, grows into sheer white curtains,
 
a bowl of cold milk, and her good hands
 

tell him he will not become a metaphor, he will sleep
in Pompeii, in Troy, in Persepolis, in every lost city that is not the sea.
 
  

to reduce human beings into carton boxes 
labeled as passport, race, sex, religion,
 

is what a butcher does, reaching his hand
 
into an animal’s carcass and pulling out its heart.  

Triin Paja is an Estonian, living in a small village in rural Estonia. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tinderbox, BOAAT, Fractal, Gloom Cupboard, and others.

© Ira Joel Haber
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