Two Poems

Abstract

16 World Literature Today Letter to Baghdad Even if my father never speaks a word of it, I will know he brought a candle, a cough, and the occupied side of his heart. I will know the trees held him, that they rose above rooflines, and where they met, he climbed and saw roads paved only with praises. The sun he carried across oceans turned copper at his window. I saw it too, on the gray edge of my childhood, and I was marked when each day awoke. He devoured the silence, the parts that could not be cured, and when he was hungry for it, I swallowed the silence, his self-portrait of confession. When I found an old shawl and silver teapot in the oven, and he pretended he didn’t know what they meant, I remembered bitter lemons had moistened his mouth. What he inhaled from his copious memory left his tongue empty then full, and somehow I know his tongue will always be brushed with the leaving. Two Poems Lauren Camp photo : perry casta ñeda library map collection january–february 2013 • 17 One day we were talking about beginnings, and I had begun. I wasn’t at the center anymore, and we kept letting in a little air, and he showed me a word for the boy he once was and he showed me this Arabic word and in this way I knew this was the most authentic mourning I would ever see. And I saw it and he said it again, and we were covered with it. Entirely covered. This was his home, he said, as he gave me the address, the place where the first time and the spurned and the color and the milkmaid stood in the alley. And even though he didn’t tell me about yesterday and the day and the day and I never saw any other way to tell it I never saw heaven or the land that was black, one day I knew enough to take the word from him and drink my fill of everything every little thing every steeped thing and there were many trees and not enough cold and we sat by the river that curves in every direction and our hearts lifted up to the birds. Why Dad Doesn’t Pay Attention to Iraq Anymore You can all stop asking about the Abu Ghraib torture and how he felt when the pictures were published of men in long hoods. He was traveling the white rim of traffic from New York to the city of brotherly love, stopping for donuts (cream-filled). When Hussein’s statue fell, he was up in his condo, organizing pencils, most with erasers. His radio tuned to Beethoven’s Sixth or some college football. Collateral damage, snipers, missiles, vessels, and hostile attention: he’s not watching. His black shadows are inverted. His horizon’s a gold minaret. The zip and clatter of dust. A river branched under a bridge, then cut from the muscle of land. He sees the circumference of dates. Unsaid words pile in dunes. All he wanted was some portion of yes and stay, those phrases no one could pack. The tick talks backward. His single truth was to stop reading; letters became drifts. In terrible gutters and columns of newsprint, the longest griefs are those we never look at. Anyway, even in war stories, everyone dies in the end. Lauren Camp is the author of This Business of Wisdom (2010) and editor of the poetry blog Which Silk Shirt. Each Sunday, she hosts Audio Saucepan, a global music/poetry program on Santa Fe Public Radio. She guest edited WLT’s special section on international jazz poetry in the March 2011 issue. “Letter to Baghdad” begins her manuscript-in-progress, One Hundred Hungers. In 2012 she received the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for another poem from this project. Editorial note: Visit WLT’s website for two more of Camp’s new Baghdad poems and her blog post detailing her effort to get firsthand information from her father for these poems. photo : david camp ...