Safia Jama

Heather

 for Lucie Brock-Broido

Soft squares of pain

   wall paper the desert sands.

Winnowing is a word I

  rarely use, wishing it

   weren’t so.

However, however.  Heather is

 also a girl’s name.

Not a woman, but a

  girl, with feathery

  hair.

Soft, soft is a pause

   in Elizabethan.

Soft.   And then antlers,

   bleeding from the inside.

   Leaning

gentle against the snow.

Meditation on Memory

It’s strange how things that happened before we were born

get braided into our consciousness—bits and pieces of

stories, passed down, like oddly matched furniture.

My mother, father, and brother, for example, escaping

Somalia is something I never witnessed,

and often forget it ever happened. The way my aunt

Janet wired my mother a lie, that their mother Mary was ill—

and my father, already out of the country, at a conference

on peace in Norway, let’s say—or maybe Belgium?

My mother must have had trouble sleeping in the nights

leading up to their escape—and she told no one save

Maryam, the woman who held and hugged my brother

through his baby years. My mother has told me little,

except that they left all the furniture, untouched,

and that she waited all night, holding her baby son

in a steaming Cairo airport, alone, running

from a military dictator who had began to jail friends

and close associates. It wasn’t safe. This story, too,

is braided into my childhood injuries, and that of everyone

in my immediate family. So when my husband and I parted

ways, it seemed natural to me to pack, as if, for a day trip,

telling no one save two friends, and my mother was angry.

“Why are you giving up that apartment?” she asked.

I couldn’t explain, really. I only knew I had to leave.

Snow makes us taller

I said to the young couple,

or young friends out walking a white fluffy Chow.

I stood on a foot bridge overlooking the frozen lake—

half-ice, half-slush. 

That was my first good walk in weeks,

maybe a month.

The railing, the guards,

the bridge had

shortened—

“Snow makes us taller,” I thought again,

out walking this morning. I walked

into the snowy park,

into mid-life.

Mid-day, I waited where last summer,

the lake was alive—ducks, milling around,

out on dates, or in squadrons.

Now the water was covered up—

I waited.

A woman and her

curious dog appeared.

I take myself on walks the way

other people walk their dogs.

I stare into bushes and sniff leaves.

“She wants to know what you see,”

said the woman.

“What’s under that snow?” I said,

and she laughed and they left.

I turned home, guessing nature had slept late.

Then I heard the tap, tap, tap.

Then I heard the cry of the woodpecker.

Then I saw a young raccoon creep out of

a tree to drink from the stream.

Then a blue jay flew, back and forth,

across the scene.

Then a squirrel bounded into the

powder, heroically, face-first.

Then a flock of sparrows peppered

the sky.

Then I saw the ladder-back with a

red cap, tap, tap,

tapping that freezing

tree—my eyes

had to half-imagine

the intricate

design—the zebra stripes

and tailored feathers.

Nature likes an audience,

like anyone. To be welcomed,

and seen.

Nothing demanded

in return.