Published in Poetry Potion 2013.01.Print Quarterly edition: On Being Human

 

Arabic Lessons in Egypt

At a masjid in Madinat Nasr
just before Maghrib
I find jidatee with her nose
in His signs
while a metronome
of bone on bone
keeps time with
each fatha
each kasra
she breathes
those knees creak as much
as the scuffed plastic
of the chair under them
she’s not really my grandmother
I hear only one word out of her hundred.
Ana la atakalam arabiyya the guidebook told me to say.
Ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya was from today’s class lesson.
jidatee, who’s not really,
fingers the dark cloth of my jacket
before pointing to my skin
she’s trying to figure it out
South African but you are not black?
Ummi’s ummi’s ummi min Hindeeyah I stumble
I haven’t yet learnt the Arabic word for great-grandmother
jidatee brings her finger to her forehead
makes a little circle with it in the middle
La, la, Muslim I say
sounds a bit like a song
and we laugh before we pray

–

 

Translations:
maghrib – the sunset prayer
jidatee – Arabic word for ‘my grandmother’
fatha – Arabic grammatical mark
kasra – Arabic grammatical mark
ana la atakalam arabiyya – I don’t speak Arabic
ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya – I am a student from South Africa
ummi – Arabic for ‘my mother’
min Hindeeya – Arabic for ‘from India’
la la- Arabic for ‘no, no’

Dear Katy

I was told you are buried in the row

alongside the highway

under a tree

along the fence I walked to them

reading names heavy with someone’s longing

none of the Khadijas I found were you Katy

I saw a man with a prayer book in his hand

standing as still as the trees and

I didn’t want to break what he had by the

leaves that would have crushed under my foot

and I left

not having found you

but knowing that the prayer I sent from my car

will get to you somehow

we could picnic in your cemetery

the sweeping spaces clipped green

and neat

the benches good for cupping us

between the hum of traffic

and the slow hush of grass

sectioned off by census of faiths

in death too we choose to lie close to our own

you would have told me so

perhaps it is that when we rise again

it will be among comforting commiserators

or if we did happen to call upon God by a rightful name

there’d be no rubbing our neighbours’ noses

in more dirt than they were accustomed to

red mounds of heaped soil for most Muslim graves

green perspex stenciled names

prayers for the highest stages in Heaven

among the few entombed and headed by

granite supplications more adamant

and then there are some with a clutch of

scratched-on plywood sticks

like plant markers

these grave gardens

grief wistfulness tend

careful beds of succulents

blooms flourishing both wild and contained

in pots and vases like

ornaments in your mother’s display cabinet

I will return to look for your tree

in this nursery of loving wives devoted husbands

dear friends and fallen angels

I will look for you  in the golden hour

when the day draws over your grave

gentle and warm God tucking you in for the night

and it feels like we’re nearing

the end of something perhaps

a hope that Death will not sneak up behind us

but walk towards us giving us

time to prepare.