Hedy Habra
(USA)
Is There Such a Thing?
There are times when even the light of a candle
is no longer needed, when night vision is a gift
and fingers write in Braille an Esperanto
where all languages intersect, their veins forking
from right to left or left to right, rising in columns
or pictographs, forming letters in tongues
foreign to the mind but somewhat legible
to the heart beneath the brushing of the skin.
Then letters stretch, meander through erratic paths
and I can almost see how their roots weaken
the way my bulbs rot from too much rain
when the rain is made of tears washing out memories,
wiping the eye socket clean, blurring the inside vision,
until we no longer remember a spark in a look,
in a gaze, not even in our own reflection.
Isn’t it often with eyes closed and teeth clenched
that we seal the chest where our fetishes are kept?
A silver bottle opener, a miniature locket, a cigarette lighter, a Burma pearl, a postcard, an autographed book, a fish-shaped pin, a tiger’s eye heart, my mother’s recipes with titles in red Gothic script, my grandmother’s chain watch incrusted with sapphires, her hand-made lace, an embroidered pillow cover with her initials “M” for Marie and a wish “Buon riposo” or whatever was salvaged from the looting, lying among the rubble of our apartment in Beirut like a lavender gray shawl with silver threads I crocheted on so many long evenings and haven’t used in twenty years,
but what is really worth remembering?
Don’t we sometimes build walls that end up
being murals of indifference whenever sealed,
or as we try to forget or remember what was
nothing but a deaf-mute dialogue, we see it,
billowing like smoke, each voice, a fragmented
monologue, twisting over itself and the other’s,
forming a Möbius chain ascending towards
the clouds, the way images once thought
everlasting vanish like ripples around raindrops
on the mutable surface of a pond when the wind
blows softly, so that no record is kept
of the turbulence, not even of the trembling lines
before stillness flattens its skin into a metallic sheet,
deepening the roots of the sycamore trees,
lengthening the tiger lilies, doubling arrow roots
into open fans over the frozen mirror.
First published by Puerto del Sol
A Bird’s Song, Unraveled
After Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds
All artists are night owls, she thinks, as circles grow wider
around her eyes. Eyelids lowered, her brush, an extension of
her violin-shaped heart, adds the last touches of blush to the
feathers’ tips. She tries to remember the right words thrown
pell-mell in the folds of memory … memory adds layers to
meaning … wants to retrieve numbers and signs from slumber,
relive the initial moment, imagines how wingless molecules
rub against each other in the copper alembic.
All it takes is a double binding broken lose to find the right
combination: only verbs are allowed. Aren’t they the heart of a
sentence? What of a wordless message as those from the heart
strung from the right chord? She holds iridium glasses to gather
light from stardust … hoopoes, hummingbirds, kingfishers,
finches, sparrows, swallows, warblers, orioles … she has lost
track of how many species flew in search of an answer, each
bird carrying its own song, from all corners of the earth.
Her wings aren’t strong enough to cross the seven valleys. She
needs to send an emissary to partake in the colloquy of birds.
Barefoot, she steps over shades of silver dust strewn by shooting
stars, conjures up their broken light night after night. The original
formula … lost since time immemorial … led to confusing myths
such as people drowning in their own reflection or making love
to their own creation. She knows the secret of the bird’s song, its
loops and roundness, but chooses silence, lets its wings flutter
through the open window. She will try again.
First published by World Poetry Today
Words Hovering Over Pond
After Remedios Varo’s Encounter
She loosely folds a muslin wrap around her
slender body, waves swirl in suspension
from head to toes as she dresses and undresses
away from her own reflection. You’d think
she’s getting ready for a performance, but
mirrors are banned from her walls, their
shattered shards buried in small boxes stacked
on shelves, their dark lids gathering dust like
archived journals, each filled with forgotten
objects, mute messages, layers shed from her past.
Each time she tries to open a box, hesitant,
she sees her fractured self staring, keeps
the lid half-open like a half-open notebook
lest she’d stumble on the tumult of empty
words, ellipses, mostly silence.
Each time she faces this startled look, she slowly
lowers the lid, won’t let the voice utter the same
unsettling questions hovering over her dreams,
over her dilated pupils still like the satin surface
of a pond, won’t let her repeat what she already knows.
First published by Valparaiso Poetry Review
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Bio
Hedy Habra has authored two poetry collections, Under Brushstrokes, finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Poetry Book Award, and Tea in Heliopolis, winner of the USA Best Book Award and finalist for the International Poetry Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American National Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. An eight-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work appears in Cimarron Review, The Bitter Oleander, Blue Fifth Review, Cider Press Review, Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Poet Lore, World Literature Today and Verse Daily.
Her website is hedyhabra.com