Translated by Sara Elkamel
They leaked from our midst
through a small hole
in a tattered bag—
their dispersal
unrushed.
Before the war
they lived with us.
I don’t recall our neighbor’s face,
but I still hear her voice:
she spoke in one tongue,
and my grandmother in another.
Perched on opposite banks
of one wall,
one of them exiled
weevils from the rice,
and the other plucked
the smallest leaves of parsley
off their stems.
Every wall caved in
during the war;
brick and tradition
bored through our homes.
Women and children
clung to one bank
and men to the other.
The chickens
now had a garden
we chased each other through.
My grandmother didn’t occupy herself
with hiding the inscriptions on her face
or shielding her daughters
from their young.
After the war,
the neighborhood succumbed
to their departure.
The state’s orders
were divine mandates.
With heavy hearts,
they sold their homes’ organs,
and we couldn’t but refuse
the remnants.
Perhaps what we feared
was the constant reminder
of their absence
or that their misfortune
would eat our homes
from the inside out.
My grandmother traversed the wall
a final time
to send-off her friend
with a gift
of exquisite fabrics;
she wanted to turn
the reality of loss
into the fiction of a new beginning.
Elated, the neighbor
raised each length
of fabric in the air like a flag,
and after raving about each one,
she delicately folded
one above the other
before her tears descended
like a deferred rain.
Damming the flood,
and the memories
of everyone who’d left,
and was leaving,
my grandmother
closed her eyes.
Her stout, plump body
trembled against her will
and though severed words
escaped her,
her faltering voice was but the silt
beneath the neighbor’s storm.
My grandmother
no longer had a friend.
She never replaced her,
never walked out into the courtyard
to lean against the wall.
With the passage of seasons,
she collected rolls of fabric,
folded them gently,
in anticipation of a surprise visitor.
