In a Word, and: Flashlight, and: Absence, and: Embrace

Abstract

In a Word, and: Flashlight, and: Absence, and: Embrace Dunya Mikhail (bio) In a Word When my students misspell Arabic,they discover how letterscan change fates.Amal (hope) can makean anagram of alam (pain),an exercise I'd hesitate to dissuade,and shafa (healing) will meansome shaqa (suffering)I can't spare them,but when they learn bahr,letting them express a desireto go to sea, I ensure they don'tspell harb, before they end upin a war they never intended.Even a kiss (qubla) could explodeif they wrote qunbla (bomb),but I can't keeptheir best teacher (life)from giving themall the lessons they need. [End Page 11] Flashlight They all know the little boyfrom the flashlighthe carries—not from a fearof the dark in Tahrir Squarebut to shine it as he searchesfor his father, among the facespainted on the tunnel wall.Every day the protestersdraw new facesand when he haloes themwith his flashlight, another deathilluminates their firmament.When one day,the little boy didn't arrive,his face was painted on the wall,beside a dimmed flashlight. Absence The tree too,gets memory loss.She forgets the birdsand their nests on the branchestenderly encircling the eggs,the breath of their flapping wingsteaching her leaves to fly.She forgets the birdsongs,as if she didn't hear them seasonafter season, just as she doesn't waitfor them to return after the storm. [End Page 12] When a bullet tumbles one birdfrom its perch, seed fallingfrom its beak—she will forgetthat, too, but she will knowsomething is missing,leaving a scar in the placewhere a strange silence abides. Embrace Deep inside the beach,moss grows around a rock:a soft embrace.When the water washes it away,it trembles like the gestureswe make waving from balconiesfor our loved onesin the time of pandemic. [End Page 13] Dunya Mikhail Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and came to the United States in 1996. Her books include In Her Feminine Sign, selected as the Wild Card Choice (UK) and chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019; The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, a finalist for the pen/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and long-listed for the National Book Award; The Iraqi Nights, which received POETRY magazine's Translation Award; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, which won the Arab American Book Award; and The War Works Hard, shortlisted for the Griffon Poetry Prize and named one of the New York Public Library's Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005. She edited a pamphlet titled 15 Iraqi Poets. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press