Ru Freeman
Winter 2025 | Poetry
UNSAID
Pitch night descent
a counter granite core stained erratic
splatter of eons on some heart
not here engraved upon
One white dish One fruit
To crush between palms (don’t cut)
Fingers (no fork)
A game (remember?)
To seek the hidden—
refugees
Her hands stain color of fear
Her life-line lifts shape of nations calling out
The kitchen clock keeps sudden pace
children in flight
The fruit rises in laughter
Terror & delight
Singular rubies drip
from her fingers
Transparent ripe of love to wake early for this
An inhaled kiss warm breath
A brush on a cheek one prayer
drawn along the silverfish dart of a daughter’s spine
I cleaned the pomegranate for you
she says before the abandonment
MIGRATION, FORCED
What is called for
when a child needs when a man needs
Under cover of a sublime dark dark skinned
I gave Into open mouths deep throating
My love regurgitated nectar
not unlike the ruby throat spilling sweet
after the hundred flights it takes her to build
that nest hung mid-air in hornbeam hackberry pine
After a thousand & five hundred mile soar
through five countries determinedly headed North
Because?
Who knows the price of things
measured by red colored stones?
The cost of vermillion first-earrings in
a first-born set of ears?
The first sound of my own name?
MIGRATION, CHOSEN
Here in the grey branches
tinnitus of sorrow surrounds
Everyone I love has taken flight
Fold up my sheltering wings
Head under my own feathers
Echo the sagacity of my countrymen
thy own hand thy own hand
thy own hand must provide
I’ve traded palms for wingspans
not built for staying
unsuited in fact for such coldness
plumage freezes in these family trees
where histories flatten & break
against ancestry affirmed on screens
Is it for this we come?
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life (2023), the short-story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the widely translated novels A Disobedient Girl (2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a New York Times Editor's Choice Book. She is the editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015) and co-editor of Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2018). She writes for the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. She is a winner of the Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the JH Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing in the US and abroad.