New Poetries VII

by Michael Schmidt

  Within thy walls of stone. Hurry on,

  Witness His truth:

  Glory is not a word, God is, God is

  Neither noun nor verb, but shears laden fields,

  He reapeth where he doth not sow.

  JAMIE OSBORN

  I no longer look at the photographs from my year as a teacher in Namibia; they seem like false memories and I cannot work out whether it is myself or the pervasive orange light that looks more out of place. I have an impulse to delete the pictures permanently. My poems were prompted, I believe, by that impulse, or in hope of countering what often seemed a favourable blankness by at some level replicating it.

  That impulse or something like it was also the main reason I took no photographs when I spent the summer of 2016 as a volunteer in the refugee camps on the Greek island of Chios. There were, of course, other reasons, some of which have informed the poems I ended up writing. Unlike the Namibian poems, which required significant reshaping (they all began as fourteen lines), the Chios poems have scarcely changed from the forms in which they came to me. For example, not a single one of the Namibian poems has kept its original opening, while in the Chios poems none of the first lines has been altered. When it came to editing, I realised, however, that the sensibility behind the poems is the same.

  There were other constants: sand kept appearing in the Namibian poems, sea in the Chios ones. But my two attempts to write more conventional ‘landscape’ poems, set in Namibia, were failures. They lacked feeling; lacked, too, a fundamental ‘otherness’.

  I am no longer directly in touch with the children or the teachers from the school in Namibia; an email exchange with one of the children, initiated four years after I had left, soon petered out. I do follow my friends from Chios on social media, but have found it hard to write to them as I move with a European’s privilege to yet another NGO job while they remain on the island or (most of them by now, thankfully) in camps in Germany. I doubt that either they nor my Namibian friends will ever see this book, and even if they did, I am not sure what the poems would mean to them. The names in the poems are real but do not correspond to actual people. Nevertheless, I want these poems to be for the actual people, my way of keeping in touch despite the erasures and the ‘otherness’.

  Did you see elephants?

  On the farm, how many types of cattle

  are there, how many donkeys, sheep?

  Draw seven of your favourite mammals.

  Which one do you see?

  ‘Listen, here is bush. This one is

  the kwe-voël – the boesman used to think about it,

  something – in English, go-away bird.’

  At Warmquelle, they said not to stay outside.

  At Chobe, lay and looked through reeds.

  Twyfelfontein: rock art, huge, red hills.

  Brandberg: slept among the chickens, with stars.

  Yes, Cape Town, District 6; in Durban, was mugged; Johannesburg, felt watched.

  Fish River Canyon: camped alone. Vast.

  What else did we learn?

  At Uis, something you wouldn’t believe.

  Go across the alphabet, draw me one for ‘e’.

  Always came back to the farms, school: nothing

  else to see.

  Namibia, August 2012 – July 2013

  Caprivian

  Elephant, we were calling him, Jumbo, Grass-man,

  Sibukuku, Mr Oh-Okay. He was knowing it, but still

  he was greeting, ‘Good-uh morning, class’

  and we did answer ‘Good-uh morning, Sir!’

  He was listening the Zambia music: when he did dance

  all the children we were laughing. He was bringing

  his cherri in the school and was calling her his kudu,

  then he is big and happy like elephants.

  He did only beat me one time: he was talking

  too much – ‘I’m use, I’m use’ – and we were sleeping.

  He made me then to write fifty times the speakings

  and the tribes of Namibia.

  I did draw for him a picture of an

  elephant eating grass. After, he was saying in his

  language, ‘thank you’.

  How we are building

  This one is my house. Here is: we are

  sleeping, this one is looking after

  the donkey, this one is making porridge.

  The bed is nice, my father’s car –

  Ah-ta-ta-ta, they are eating nice things!

  Chips – and meat–

  and ice cream –

  macaroni – rice – and joguit – banana – cheese –

  This one is the ostrich. See –

  he is running – at – he is running fast!

  Take, Sir –

  Sticks, lost keys, camelthorn

  pods, butter boxes, string, two left shoes: a donkey,

  bakkies, stone

  houses, treasures –

  this is how we are building: glass, and

  jars, vaseline, broken books, Jou

  Kombuis: koerant

  – photo me –

  we hoard

  leaves, or shadows, bits

  of pencil, sandgrains,

  marble,

  stars

  Lukas

  First day: smiling, he spread his arms,

  danced to make us laugh.

  Twenty years, teaching:

  ‘they do not know they are learning, mos,

  we are playing!’

  Two weeks in, he beat a donkey giving birth

  outside the gate, threw stones at the children who watched.

  Later, he gripped

  our hands through the fence, laughing.

  Pink eyes, blotchy skin;

  breath rattled as he poured out the problems

  of the San. ‘I am teaching them their language.

  Look –’ with an empty bottle

  he jabbed at the ground. ‘What is it? You see?’

  Staring at the marks – ‘we are playing, nê?’

  – he stretched, spilled on the sand to sleep.

  C22 Gobabis – Otjinene

  Is my father’s car – they noted

  every vehicle that passed, drew

  Toyota, Isuzu in the sand.

  Sophia Moses raced engine’s sound

  along the fence, stood pointing, waited

  for applause.

  Families in overloaded bakkies

  stared, drunks in donkey carts

  waved.

  Every month the combi was sent

  for bags of sugar, paper. We timed

  exactly its return.

  Lorries rattled through the night,

  taking livestock north, or

  beer crates for the bars. A taxi,

  playing P-Square, Chop My Money, spewed

  dirty smoke.

  Hilux: belonging to Mrs Nel,

  travelling home.

  The Farming Minister tooted his horn, once.

  ‘It’s true, it’s your father’s car,’ we’d say,

  ‘where is he going?’ They laughed,

  drew maps of their games.

  No landings yet

  Alicia rounds the camp. 5 a.m., the call.

  Voice slurred and fuming as she buggers

  down the beach.

  At Mandamados, she reared

  a boy in each hand: Ali Reza, darling,

  you’re a thief.

  Returns, the manager,

  orders toilets to be dug, tables repaired,

  at her command the gate is given a fellatial lick of paint.

  Fuck it.

  Her bosom neat, smart, from her shirt-

  front she pulls

  a fifty-dollar note. Ali Reza,

  where can you look, when she passes without so much

  as a glance, hopeful, like us?

  Skala Sikaminias, Lesvos, June 2016

  Distribution

  Alison buys shoes. The young men,

&nbs
p; most alone, blow kisses

  as she ascends. By torchlight from the car

  we form a chain, pass

  bin bags rapidly, try to save

  size 39, 42,

  from rain and children beating on the glass.

  Alison issues: single line, up to age twenty-four

  or nothing. Chaos, of course.

  Dureid is first to bend his knee, grab

  Alison by the hand. She screams.

  We do not know the words that pass, only

  that she slams the door, severs in the hinge

  a thumb. Blood, stains.

  Token of undying love, his stump

  pressed against the wall, as we’re

  escorted out in torchlight, one by one.

  Souda, Chios, August 2016

  Worship

  They come for water. For months, if not for years,

  they’ve queued, fragile men and women, shepherds

  from the mountains and fishwives with stone bottles

  and greying, chipped hands. The tiles at their feet

  are worn to troughs that still reflect the sun;

  above, the dome’s copper, smoothed out

  since dawn.

  Why don’t they kneel?

  At other churches, on other islands, worshippers come

  with worry beads, cross themselves forever in blue-eyed

  Mary’s sight. Here, they bend, stiffly,

  one arm. Preserve their families in jars of salt.

  Lot’s wound. On the beach

  they offer cures for those

  who, they say, are lost.

  Mytilini, Lesvos, June 2016

  Ladies’ chapel

  The old man in the suit squats and offers reluctantly

  his meal to share. Chickpeas and chicken.

  I’ve brought clothes – his trousers are thinner

  than the grey hair patching from his lips.

  And a football for the children. What do you think,

  he says, pulling the t-shirt from between his legs

  and tying it round his ribs – so Nasibeh can ask For women? repeat

  three tents hold four families here in the stink

  of cooking fat and the old man’s weed as he shucks

  more time, sheds chicken skin,

  watches the football, clattering down the stairs.

  ‘Al-Kanisa’/ Dipethe, Chios, August 2016

  Forgive me

  Don’t trust my people. Mohammad’s hands and eyes

  turn to water. At the corner,

  street lamps have spilled oil on his hair, his glasses,

  brilliant. He flows to your arms,

  a hush in your ear. Why don’t you listen to me?

  Drunk. You need him still:

  to reach deeper, gasping in the cold air.

  Behind him, the club music, beating.

  Chios, July 2016

  What you expect

  You were packing socks when the journalists

  came knocking. Warm, soft wool

  or its memory kept your hands from shaking.

  Roll up, fold down.

  They wanted your children first, then your husband,

  finally you –

  laid out another blanket,

  three plates, questions

  skittered to you,

  watching as if the camera picking up your movements

  could tether the walls’ billow, could recall a house

  or sheepskin-lined boots, wolfish cries

  and, callous, women streaming across the street.

  You look towards the interpreter, who shakes her head,

  as if you’d been betrayed.

  Souda, Chios, August 2016

  Meidjie sings

  At nightfall in the lean-to,

  Meidjie sings the colours.

  She sings the houses, white over green.

  She sings the grey and crimson crests, the lourie birds.

  She sings the camelthorn’s silvering leaves.

  She sings the fire, she sings the clouds,

  she sings the smoke, and our frightened eyes.

  She sings the night, she sings the ash, she does not sing the sunrise.

  She sings the hunt, she sings for sugar. She sings the bottle stores.

  She sings the dead man in the road after the thunderstorm.

  She sings the storybooks, the lion and the mouse,

  she sings the net and the jackal’s laugh.

  She sings a blue sun, she sings a yellow sea,

  she sings of green grass, and a face lost in grey.

  She sings our questions, how long is home, she sings of flying,

  she sings of sleep. We take her sleep.

  We take her voice, we take her photograph.

  From her we take a dream of night,

  a dream of fire; for her we dream that this is everywhere,

  we dream of shelter, we dream of clouds.

  We dream of children, waiting in the cold.

  We dream of songbirds, we dream of ash in the stars, we dream of little Meidjie,

  – and Meidjie sings.

  Gqaina Primary School, Namibia, August 2013

  MARY JEAN CHAN

  As a multilingual poet from Hong Kong, I have chosen to write in English, yet Chinese is always there in my work as its foil or fraternal twin, largely owing to the fact that I only speak in Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and my mother does not speak English. I love how Vahni Capildeo – another Carcanet and former New Poetries poet – depicts her relationship to language in Measures of Expatriation: ‘Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular.’ As a queer poet, I have felt language’s unique capacity for carrying and transforming trauma. I have experienced how an attentiveness to form – be it a sonnet or pantoum, or simply a tercet or couplet – offers a powerful means to negotiate complex emotions that arise from our lived experiences as social, political and historical beings. I hold fast to the words of Adrienne Rich, who maintained that ‘lying is done with words, and also with silence’. The poems that have been selected for this anthology represent some of my attempts at speech, with the hopes of revealing and overcoming the long shadow of shame cast by internalised homophobia and racism, all the while responding to the lyric demands of poetry: the necessity of honouring each poem’s inner music and cadence.

  I came to poetry at the age of twenty-one out of a desperate need for language, and found reassurance in the work of poets such as Mary Oliver, who offered my young, closeted self these generous, life-saving words in her poem Wild Geese: ‘You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.’ I have since sought to write poems that reflect the struggles of queer youth, poems about how intergenerational trauma caused by historical events such as the Cultural Revolution can threaten to unravel the soundest of minds and the most loving of familial bonds. I wish to meditate on how we might hope to heal and care for ourselves as well as those we love in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances. Ultimately, these selected poems are expressions of desire for a more compassionate world in which we might learn, in the words of Claudia Rankine, ‘how to care for the injured body’ so our best selves can thrive and flourish.

  They Would Have All That

  To sing the evening home, the lover prepares

  a pot of lentil stew – her phone lighting up to

  the news of love’s imminent arrival, imagining

  her lover’s footsteps across the swollen field,

  damp with longing, her lover’s steady hand

  gripping her smartphone to navigate towards

  some notion of home, their flat an unfamiliar

  place of worship, their bodies growing close

  and moving apart with the regularity of heart-

  beat, blood-breath. There the lover is, running to

  catch a bus she knows will take her somewhere

&nb
sp; so she can feel once again the sensation of lack –

  wondering at her lover’s motions throughout the flat,

  how her feet must press insistently on the floor with

  each step, how the orchid must have stretched itself

  a few millimetres overnight, how the stew must be

  whispering on the stove and the table set for dinner.

  The lovers are gentler with each other now because

  they have memorised each other’s fears like daily

  prayer: how too much salt brings back the years of

  loneliness, how a warm bath may be more necessary

  than a rough kiss after a day’s absence of tenderness.

  The lovers are gentler because they have grown too

  knowledgeable to love any other way. When one asks

  the other to fling her onto the bed, the lover might say:

  Do you actually want me to? And the lover might reply:

  No, I don’t. Such asking becomes routine, almost like

  walking down the aisle of a supermarket at evening,

  but it is what they do best as lovers. Beyond desire

  and its petty dramas, the two women will have their

  tapestry of days and nights, their hands tempered by

  love, clasped bodies holding their wounds at bay.

  Three Sonnets

  Versions from the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars

  Èrshísì Xiào or The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars is a classic text of Confucian filial piety written during the Yuan Dynasty (1260 –1368), and has been used as an example of how Chinese children should honour their parents.