ONE BY ONE

 

Looking for my guests

I turn to the untouched snow

surface, under it thousands

of fingerprints

none of which recognize me.

 

I hear them but donât see

voices from all directions

want to be heard one by one

Uninvited quests are heard the most.

 

The living and dead, among them the sister

who never was mine

fluttered through my window

carrying open coffins of my longing.

 

Like fog after rain they populate

the roomâs space as my new furniture

I take them out on the snow

one by one and put there, their fingerprints

under the surface

where the uninvited guests

already have been.

 

No silence comes

so the voices of uninvited guests

are heard as much as all the others.

 

Jasim

------------------

NOSTALGIA

 

If only it were so:

That I could live from day to day

in a car beside the pounding stream of the cities

without the superiority of trees long gone neither with the memory of

flies

nor with the never ending return of migrant birds,

 

On my tongue, my heart would grow

and I, without sighing

would weave into my nightshirt, the remains of Grandfather.

 

Now I lay my ear

against timeâs thin trunk

and hear the syncopated meandering of ants.

 

It is Autumn and the rain of blind longing

destroys all traces, past seasons

and homes built of other than words

 

Only the antâs memory of the road is left standing like a broken-down

carnival

 

Jasim

-----------------

MY MOTHERâS DREAM

 

I found, washed ashore in a bottle

a dream

written on orange-petals

 

Which I offered

at the feet of my mother.

 

She lifted up the dream

and placed it on her tongue

like a communion wafer

 

Turning her face towards the starless heavens

she chanted:

 

This was my dream's swept up from the footprints of Ruth

as she wandered towards herself

 

Three thousand years ago.