Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms by Hayan Charara

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 20, 2015   Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms   Hayan Charara

The trees alongside the fence bear fruit, the limbs and leaves speeches to you and me. They promise to give the world back to itself. The apple apologizes for those whose hearts bear too much zest for heaven, the pomegranate for the change that did not come soon enough. Every seed is a heart, every heart a minefield, and the bees and butterflies swarm the flowers on its grave. The thorn bushes instruct us to tell our sons and daughters who carry sticks and stones to mend their ways. The oak tree says to eat only fruits and vegetables; the pine says to eat all the stirring things. My neighbor left long ago and did not hear any of this. In a big country the leader warns the leader of a small country there must be change or else. Birds are the same way, coming and going, wobbling thin branches. The warblers express pain, the crows regret, or is it the other way around? The mantra today is the same as yesterday. We must become different. The plants must, the animals, and the ants and worms, just like the carmakers, the soap makers before them, and the manufacturers of rubber and the sellers of tea, tobacco, and salt. Such an ancient habit, making ourselves new. My neighbor looks like my mother who left a long time ago and did not hear any of this. Just for a minute, give her back to me, before she died, kneeling in the dirt under the sun, calling me darling in Arabic, which no one has since.            Copyright © 2015 by Hayan Charara. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I began the poem with fruit in mind, apples specifically, and not my mother, and definitely not as an elegy, but that I went there is no surprise. I’m almost the same age my mother was when she died, a fact I let hover over me. Be that as it may, for a long time now I’ve felt that all my poems, ultimately, are elegies, even when—especially when—they are bursting with life.” —Hayan Charara   Hayan Charara’s new collection of poems Something Sinister will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2016. He is the editor of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2008) and teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.   Photo credit: Rachel de Cordova Most Recent Book by Charara   The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006) "Elegy Composed in the New York Botanical Garden" by Eugenia Leigh "Elegy in X Parts [Kafka said, A book]" by Matt Rasmussen "Guidebooks for the Dead" by Cynthia Cruz Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038