That day a pigeon was pecking at rice someone had thrown away
& a man cut bright lemons from his orchard, bearing them away.
& a man cut bright lemons from his orchard, bearing them away.
A wooden crucifix & a woven prayer mat, incense & holy water:
what meaning have these things when you have gone away?
When lake water rushed over your skin & they pulled you out
I took it as a promise that God would clear your sins away.
Before you left, you never told me the name of your uncle they shot
or the name of the hot-headed shooter in Peshawar they locked away.
Then I dreamt of the markhor, mountain-born, horns twisted into scrolls
with curled letters spelling the direction for me to run away.
The taxi had no headlights & on the way to Tivoli the driver,
in dark streets saying Christ was just an ordinary man, lost his way.
Flight 9611: the day I realized you did not want me
to be happy & like so many bullets I stored the memories away.
You once told me there was a place in Pakistan where those cursed
to love someone out of reach hid themselves & prayed their days away.
It was only a year. What was is no longer there, you say, calling me
Aisha for the last time. I am still waiting for God to show me a way.
by Kara Barlow
Kara Barlow is a trilingual poet studying her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Over the past several years, she has lived in the Dominican Republic, rural Spain, Rome, and Costa Rica, and she wrestles with questions of fragmentation, suffering, and the violence at the heart of the human experience through her poetry. She considers her work as a translation exercise between complex realities of trauma, resilience, and longing. Her poem “A Litany for Survival” is currently forthcoming in the Bear Review.
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