Amal El-Mohtar, ''Pieces'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Pieces

"Listen to the shooting," he said. "Can you hear it? It's hammering on us like rain."
— Omar, a protestor in Homs.

The world is wrong and I am wrung,
a bell of cloth dripping salt
into an earth too broken for roots.
I am a jumble, I am a heap,
a tangle of wires crosspurposed
and my voice is glass
and my voice is in the earth
and the rain is made of metal and mortar
and fire scorns water thin as air and the heat
melts skin. The world is wrong
and I am stung, I am raw to this wasp-air's buzz
to these teeth stacked like walls
against words, against tongues,
and I would tell these sons of men
something so shiningsharp that they would sing with it
hold the sun in a cup of their hands
but this glass voice breaks in my throat
and I would speak swallows with clear wings
to scrape an augury against the sky in splinters
but no one speaks glass.

( My grandmother is a country I would know... )

{This poem was originally published in Stone Telling]