Reaching
Nod
The wind has cursed us while we’ve mounted;
the
sun has sucked the rains from every leaf.
The sand has smothered
everything we’ve counted;
heat has wrung us out without
relief.
We’ve gathered up our memories, kin, belief
and
ridden towards the shimmering vague horizon
to catch our
clouds that God himself has scattered,
to where the killing eye
now rises on
the pilgrims to the green, begrimed and
battered,
kings of sweat and lands that never mattered.
Cast
out, adrift, we labour through the sand.
The weaker of two powers,
we ride. Cast out:
zealous fire burns behind us in the
hand
catastrophe has stripped of any doubt.
To Nod we ride in
the panic of a rout.
We seek the dark oasis and its mercy;
its
trees to give us shelter, give us fruit,
and arriving in the haze,
our beasts all curtsey,
weary of the way, parched and
mute,
unaccustomed to the traffic of Beirut.
Disaster drove
us from each farm and village
as once drought drove us to the
vagrant rain.
And then as now, no land to hold for tillage:
we’re
just the city’s memory of pain;
the yellow of a smoker's
finger-stain.
The clouds are always far enough and
wander
through the vista of the camp we call our
homes;
occasionally it shakes with claps of thunder
and mocks
the weary traveller as he roams
the quartier where you find the
gastronomes.
The black and white that forms the early dawn
— A
keffiyah’s mix of in-between two states —
is when our eyes
arise; when a child is born
between the dark and light, and
re-creates
the hope that ties together all our fates.
We
watch the skies in case of new disaster,
when sands can come to
drive us further on.
For nature, like the wolf’s a fickle
master,
and guarded lambs are quickly snatched and gone.
Safe
journey through this world’s an eidolon.
Nigel
Holt
|