It's not so much that it is hard

as easier to seal into,

in secret dark, a cellar barred

away, the wants I knew I knew

would always be, and tell myself

the better thing would be to will

them gone. But bowed, a burdened shelf

within me creaks beneath them still.

And days are long when measured 

in regrets replete with years

of gifts I should have treasured,

turned to moldered souvenirs.

I know this lesson now, I say, 

but still I take my time,

and lose in a despondent way

what left of it is mine.

My body says "I'm tired,"

"You tire me," retorts my spirit,

and hisses, "Damn you, cut me free."

I struggle not to hear it.

And maybe it's the weight of what

I shouldn't say that bids me seek

a rock to whisper to the things that

I had lacked the grace to speak

when there was time — I know there never 

was a possibility 

but also know that it were better

had I mourned, then, and honestly.

At night when I am smallest

and the crater walls are high

the stones run fingers down my back

and press me up against the black

and I could swear I hear them cry

at night when I am smallest

I've begged you then to let me die 

and sometimes feigned a sudden slack

as if this grief were just a bear.

I'd never thought of it as prayer

when being shaken limp with lack

I begged you'd let me die

I've not consulted zodiac

or wailed at empty air

but, bent beneath remorse, confessed

as though a judge were standing there

who doesn't speak but echoes back

and in the silence after, I

can see the crater filled with sky

at night when I am smallest

Could we be sisters? asked the tree

her scraggly crown abuzz in thought,

If spinning on my seedwings, I'd

not landed in this little pot,

but grown amidst your tangled roots

and known what things they say

and learnt the lilts of choral chems

and shared the songs, the dance, the day.

Would now it be presumptuous

(if only I could stand)

to pull myself from this thin mulch

and try to root in righter land?

"She does not know our languages,

what could she take, what could she give?

Her cankered boughs won't bear the sun.

We do not think that she will live."

They're right, I think, to rule it out,

abide what cannot be unmade.

But I would wane the sweetest season

nodding in your shade.

for an Old Woman

The first meagre minutes of the day

can’t tempt me from bed, but something from my fever years drives me

out and I am 

in a low, peculiar vantage point,

the screen window above me

catches nettling light I squint through, looking

for the sick heat of other days

for a way out not through this gouged place

for roots not split shells, old names

or chastisement for a fool returning —

my gaze has drifted.

again I look slantwise up. from nowhere

an impossibly opal sunrise

circles the world in pearl ember,

look! I close my eyes and miss you

I haven’t written from this place for years, barely read.

that part of me doesn’t want to eat,

knows like old cats and toothless elephants

know, that sustenance is not the answer,

know to look

elsewhere, but not anywhere I can find

the wind

ruffles the sky,

            listen

are you listening with me?

as water runs softly over my face, falls in tiny thuds

to the wind

tousling

the shifting sides and secret nooks

of that bright unlikely expanse…

a white tarp, of course, stretched over the neighbours’ roof

eyes pushing forty have grown no wiser

and lead me no better than before,

but what did they see for that moment?

somewhere beyond a membranous surface

I took for the sky

I shouldn't have been surprised, but was unprepared for the cruelty of the Toronto Sun's libel against Asmaa Hussein, whose husband was killed this Friday at a peaceful protest in Alexandria. Insinuations that her one-time employment at one school within a global institute through whose doors a handful of notorious men drifted, in disparate times and places, could be grounds for condemnation or a withdrawal of sympathy, can only appeal to a degenerate mass. They are a reminder that doubt can be spread dumbly, perversely, for the sake of insulating prejudice as much as for spurring inquiry that would reveal it.

I knew Asmaa in undergrad, not well at all, but well enough to be dumbstruck with horror at what has happened to her young family over the past five days. I took a poetry class with her in second year, and while I was an editor at the Varsity she was working in an office directly above mine, editing the Muslim Voice. We attended one or two events with the same party, knew one another through mutual friends, and understood each other a sight better than strangers would. The hideous crimes inflicted on her late husband, her, and their 9-month-old baby, which have been followed by inhumane insults in Egypt and here in her home, I have watched her bear with unimaginable grace, courage and articulateness that have left me shaken by her faith and understanding of what it is to be human.

To those insufficiently concerned with such things, know that you make yourselves apparent when you fling stones at people in her position who happen to fit profiles you've chosen to hate. Her friends, I am sure, are needed as few people ever are. The rest, including those at the Sun prone to feeling deserved guilt, I would suggest should back off. And imagine themselves in her situation, rather than grasping at reasons not to.