Selected poems
And they have called it peace ... Rome creates a desert and calls it peace ... *
Alas for mangled vineyards, charred olives, trampled wheat; alas for children bleeding in rubble of the street; the sands will be the victor in fiefdoms of the East, as gardens sink in ashes beneath death's barren lease, and they decree new deserts where wells flowed deep and sweet, carving out a wasteland where widows grieve and weep, as they impose new orders where clans once herded sheep, harvesting the chaos that bitter spore must yield to those who reap the whirlwind and deem such deserts 'peace'.
*Tacitus, after the rout of an insurrection, led by the Celtic queen Boudicaa, against Rome's occupation of Britain.
Picture dictionaries
The pages they want copied are the ones about the body, prompted by a need for reinvention in the second tongue.
Naming the corporeal self in English, one is born again, having survived the shredding of identity as best one can.
Then they fan out, ranging across different hunting grounds. A woman from Liberia locates words for her homeland's mammals, a petite Vietnamese adores a page of birds; others delve in grocery lists, furnished rooms in ideal homes.
The olfactory senses resist makeovers in some. A young Afghani woman samples images of melons. 'In my country, cantaloupes were like the watermelons here — very big and sweet. The way they taste is different in my country ...'
Overcome with homesickness, she leaves before the lesson ends, drowning in the esters of lost summers.
Harvest of the sea
Three children drift ashore on Mytilene like dolphins paralysed by dynamite, but these are human forms — daughters of a troubled land surrendered to the sea.
Where East meets West, the shores of the Aegean can mean sanctuary, glimmering through this ordeal — the dark voyage, a winter gale — but amulets that kept them safe on trails through hostile wilderness are powerless against the frenzied waves.
Old women recall other times when corpses surfaced in the nets, or washed ashore from Aivali and Smyrna; they watch the wheel revolve again: three little sisters found too late, where strangers close the coffins, dig the graves.
Refugees returning home
Across the black hole of my solitude, the self-indulgent pit where I lick self-inflicted wounds, lightly step returning refugees.
They know why they trek through forest, crossing rivers, day by day, on bruised and