Paradise Is Orange
A Syrian journalist flees Homs with her infant daughter and writes
of their journey to the Greek island of Lesvos.
I
A terrible crossing we had of it,
six miles of it,
three hours into headwinds,
forty crammed upright in a dinghy for ten;
all eyes on the waterline,
and the night seas running past,
and the bow riding high, slamming us
again and again into the sea;
the pitch drenching, bodies
lashed into each other;
our cries, pleas caught by the wind:
“O daughter of mine --
does it end here? Is it here
we disappear?”
II
Of this remember nothing,
my labor, my wet bundle,
or of the night screams echoing
in the streets of Homs,
or of our terror and flight,
and now this smuggler straining at the helm,
drunk and shouting into the wind:
"People, swallow your tears not the sea;
you are the fortunate ones,
I am staying in the boat with you,
I am taking you to paradise,
to the island of beautiful women,
who love everybody, wine, poetry, even you,
who go off with your miserable hopes, ho, ho,
to Europe, to Europe."
III
They waved us aboard for this,
waving their guns and our money;
these Mafya, unbathed, oily-eyed, grinning,
the eyes of their guns on each of us,
taking the life out, pointing the way.
3600 lira for anybody, the toothless old and young,
and the drowned children, waved into the sea,
one hundred, the count rising
after that baby, Alyan Kurdi,
lost with his mother, sister, brother,
washed back to shore, face down,
for his father to remember.
IV
“Know us by what we carry
and what we leave behind,"
your father said to me,
as they took him away,
love and destruction in our eyes,
the city of our people pulverized,
its rubble to the edge of the sky.
And from the skies above our streets
the voice of General Suheil al-Hassan, the Tiger,
murderous poet of the barrel bomb,
his blast flesh stuck to our walls,
calling down over loudspeakers
in rasping verse to his enemies,
to surrender or die.
V
On my life you will never hear
such a man again,
or the down-splitting air of his sky,
or before his henchmen cry
with our blood on their hands,
which in your father's name
may they taste again each morning
with their smokes and cruelty.
And so we ran, became nobodies,
shadows on trails where no grass grows,
no longer to choke in our doorway
on the stench of their C4 --
its burnt flesh, bitter almonds and tar --
our last taste of Asia in that air.
VI
In the fall it was Damascus;
all the boats full of Damascus.
“We have papers, ask us,” the lucky ones said,
“Aleppo, Homs, Damascus are falling,
and the islands are calling. Take us to Chios,
Kos, Leros, Lesvos or Farmakonisi;
each a name for freedom just over the horizon.”
“Pay for your welcome, nobody drowns,”
said the Turks at Izmir, signing them on,
“safe passage guaranteed or your money back, easy.”
VII
Perishables! Easy money
packed in a rubber raft or dingy,
a shove from shore, your pilot, see!
over there, swimming back!
And you adrift to a dead reckoning of it,
the sudden intimacy of horizons,
floaters for islands, or, worse,
on a starless night to be marooned
without compass, out of sight and luck
and drifting in widening circles, as if moonstruck
on the lunatic eye of this sea.
VIII
Paradise is orange, my blue one,
rising there before us
mountains of orange on Lesvos,
as the night lifts and the sea lets go of us,
frozen and wet at dawn;
a cold dawn, icy-fingered
harbinger of winter,
as we step into the journalism of it,
what the world sees in these shallows of Europe:
shredded rubber boats, inner tubes,
children's pool toys, everywhere bright-eyed Dora
the Explorer and always the color ...
IX
of paradise undone; flotillas
of orange dots, waves of them
incoming on that back-lit sea
months on end to this migration's
great littering where it landed.
Life jackets strewn on the spot,
trails of them inland
(by one count, 450,000)
to the orange mountains
rising and deflating in the Aegean sun.
What else, Europe, will these tides give up
to your sirens of hope? Listen!
Beneath the waves and winds
another graveyard's drifting in.
X
On the spot, on our knees,
you wailing in my arms,
At first I heard gods in so many voices:
the aid workers and media
embracing us, feeding the news cycle,
the Afghans crying for joy at survival,
Syrians tearing the tape off their cell phones
and selfie sticks for pictures,
the American actress, Susan Sarandon,
her teeth as white as alabaster,
reaching for you before the cameras,
lifting you high, daughter,
my squirming, miraculous survivor.
Does everyone in America smell like butter?
XI
These are the fortunate ones:
Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan refugees
whom the sea lets go,
beyond Thessaloniki, beyond Macedonia,
while others shiver in mud under flimsy cardboard
with blue lips and hands,
protesting bitterly in their camp
for "economic migrants."
To most the names on the road are stone;
and Gevgelija and Idomeni,
where the borders are closing,
where the winter will find them;
Iranians already sitting with their lips sewn shut,
Bangladeshi with signs "Help Us or Shoot Us."
XII
The locals despise us all equally:
"Skoupidia"- "Wandering trash"
No one would give us a ride.
It was then on the road to Molyvos
I saw the two young jihadis from Homs
beautiful faces in a sullen river of faces,
memorizing verses deep into the Qur'an,
reciting them quietly day and night;
a brief lifetime of righteousness,
a son's dream of Hafiz, taking ten
to paradise; father, mother, others,
while for myself, their childhood neighbor,
a long stare and erasure.
XIII
We travel in many footsteps,
women in the shadows of men, lonely men
without women on the long road north. And I know you, husband without money,
citizen, hypocrite, neighbor,
owned by your greasy smuggler,
who sells your wife to any bidder.
For me, daughter, no one will barter;
I will not bathe until Germany.
I shall carry with me a mighty female foulness;
I will spread my own red ochre against their lust.
Forgive me, sweetness out of my body;
pray that no one will want me.
XIV
Goodbye, paradise!
island of strong women;
receive our sea-borne children,
arriving on their own, bloated and boatless
onto Lesvos, Kos, Leros, Chios and Farmakonisi;
their eyes fathomless in the shallows of freedom.
Imagine them together, swaying
in the sea's embrace and singing
how the legend came to be
of babies rising from this sea.
Hear Alyan Kurdi's father alone in his hell:
"Send me their toys, I want their smell.”
—<>—
Notes
Disclosure: The author is neither female nor Syrian; the speaker is a product of his imagination. Part of the inspiration for this poem came from Zena Agha’s recital of her own poem “The Sea Is Big” at PRI’s forum on the refugee crisis at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School at Harvard on November 19, 2015.
By one count, 450,000 life jackets were strewn and collected on the island. Alyan’s father, Abdullah Kurdi, recounted the horror of losing his family: “I wish I could transfer my breath to them, to breathe life into their bodies again … We spent a whole hour holding on to the boat. My children were still alive. The first one died because of the raging waves. I had to leave him to save my second son, who also drowned. I turned around to find that their mother had drowned as well.”
Kurdi told HuffPost Arabi that poverty kept him from buying flotation devices for Aylan, 3, Galip, 5, and wife Rehan, 35, who all hailed from the Syrian town of Kobani. “Gathering the costs for fleeing wasn’t easy, and I couldn’t secure the price of the life jackets,” he said. Reported in the HuffPost Arabi, 09/03/15.
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Respond to the line “The sky has an opening.” by Mark Strand
in “A Piece of the Storm.” -- Robert Wrigley
Blast Silhouettes
for Robert Wrigley
1
At midnight on the perimeter,
when he thinks no one’s looking,
he pats a warhead, “easy there,”
touches its sleek sides, HAWK,
centurion of the skies,
then pats each one down the line.
Involuntary act, “conduct unbecoming”
an officer in this man’s army;
a voice in his head, echoed by
a chattering down slope, mockery
beyond the barbed wire --
slicky boys looking to breach again.
2
Off into the night
from across the Yellow Sea,
green blips on his radar screen,
blip-blipping south and east,
massing into solid green
along the 700-mile fail safe line.
And the dark mountains to his north,
pocked like terrible acne,
those silent ferocious deaths.
And the silence of the blast silhouettes,
on the Aioi bridge at Ground Zero,
where he stood a week ago,
looking into a dirty haze
above Hiroshima,
for what? Little Boy descending?
The skies splitting open above him?
Or seen in his upward gaze
at the last instant, there!
3
Boy ascending! White thing
flying back to bay intact,
into Mama Enola Gay, “silver
airplane with a white long tail”
in that beautiful blue sky before the drop.
Fly away Boy with your ungodly shock,
instant evaporation of blood in their brains
before they felt the great wind,
saw the clouds of ash
above their radiated city,
became its charred remains,
its shadows at his feet.
So he stands, ridiculous pilgrim,
turning back the clock
at the epicenter of his thought,
in a firestorm of lunacy,
not all his; while Japanese
rush by him on their way to work.
4
Tonight in South Korea,
Code Red, October 1962,
the world again is nuclear.
Skies open at dawn or sooner.
Somewhere above somewhere
it will be faultlessly blue.
When console bands swarm
with green blips incoming,
who else will give the warning?
Wherever your hands are then,
on duty, at prayer, or at loose ends,
make a sign to someone you love.
He’s been on site a week
with nothing much to prove.
Stay awake, don’t malinger.
So he pats the warheads down the line,
flips the boys the pilgrim sign
with a middle finger.
5
From their black pitch below
the payload in the launch zone
the slicky boys appear.
It’s not his aim they fear,
nor his useless sidearm,
as they approach the wire.
“Agi jung-wi!” they taunt,
“agi jung-wi!”
“아기 중위!”
“Baby lieutenant, baby lieutenant,
where are your war dogs?
Show us your teeth!
-<>-
Notes
These events took place during a tour of duty with the U.S. Army Air Defense in South Korea around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. Composed in verse in 2015.
Slicky boys are local scavengers. War dogs, the German shepherd guard dogs, were usually on leash patrol on site and the only effective deterrent to the slicky boys.
“Silver airplane …” words of Shigeko Sasamori, a resident of Hiroshima who was 13 years old when she survived the first nuclear weapon dropped on a city. Cited in “7 Things You Learn Surviving a Nuclear Blast,” interview by Robert Evans, Cracked, October 5, 2014.
-<>-
— Capeside
“The Kennedy poem (“Capeside”) is a masterpiece. It should be taught.”
— John Rosenthal
“This is the hour after or before, echoless.”
— Allen Grossman
1
The senator is up onto the bridge now,
sailing off in repose above me;
the hum of his entourage gliding north
beneath the thrum of helicopter blades
sweeping the airwaves to Boston
to the cathedral on Mission Hill.
-<>-
Along the canal the tide shifts in its wake.
A rusty Liberian tanker slides by,
heading out to some port in the North Atlantic,
to empty out, take on, return.
On the far breakwater solitary fishermen
and tiny families fit against the sky.
-<>-
To the south two storms converge off-shore
into a long cloud, perfectly formed.
From its dark under layers a cloud fishhook
hangs down beyond Hyannis. I’m caught
by such surreal painting, what a catch,
the line hard on the hand, the reel spinning.
-<>-
I close my eyes and familiar sounds sharpen:
two little girls at the shore’s edge discover a star fish;
a woman calls out over fast moving water;
a single prop lugs off to the northwest.
For an instant it shifts inside me too,
as if these tides were tugging
the raised arm of the Cape toward Ireland.
-<>-
The senator is beyond all this;
two cities congregating await him.
Capeside, they say he’s out on the Sound,
miles out (beyond the dissipating fish hook),
tacking cross winds to open water,
past the scourging landmark of Chappaquiddick,
out to where his brothers’ voices gather.
2
In his last hours in the dead of winter,
his home to him unrecognizable,
my father stirred out of bed,
called me by his brother’s name, “Bill,
get us over the bridge to the Cape!”
To Alfred Noyes, his Falmouth childhood pal,
who lived above the garage down the street
from his father’s summer house,
that time when he was always a boy.
-<>-
And us restraining him, saying, “Pop, Poppa,
it’s February out there, all frozen, all snowed in,
wait for spring!“ (where there was no spring).
From his bed his eyes took an edge
for the strangers keeping him from the bridge.
3
From the canal I turn south to where
my father flew in his last hours for peace,
his home on the mainland darkened and erased.
I sit above an empty ball field next to that garage
to replay the seasons of his life and wait
for what? For something on a breeze,
a trace of voices, laughter, snatch of song
above his father’s overflowing lawn?
Add a bit of Harry Lauder, please,
on a scratchy post-war thirty-three,
to catch that weekend gaiety down the street.
Do keep it lively, as it was for me.
4
All gone. Dead air. No hint of kin.
“Just you,” a voice could have said.
No soul-bearing breeze, nothing on a wind;
no crow’s raucous cry or poetry;
no blue manifestation in a place so thin
you’d have to squeeze a revelation in.
No “Father, are you there?” or such imaginings.
No flash of you boys inseparable,
dashing off through the trees like hell,
as if some hound was gnashing at your heels.
No, none of this, and nothing else embraceable
in these absences I feel.
-<>-
But hear, still tugging on these lines, these naughts,
all true and Harry too, here briefly caught,
his wee deoch an doris, its tinny Gaelic chorus,
an echo from the music halls afore ye gang awa;
a daft old tune for the reel inside my head,
to take to the bridge and off to bed.
—<>—
Notes
1. Blue manifestation. From the younger W. B. Yeats, who astonished the old Fenian leader and literary critic, John O’Leary, with accounts of “blue manifestations in the Dublin hills.” “Great God in heaven, Mr. Yeets, what do you mean?”
2. deoch and doris. (Gaelic) for a drink at the door, a last farewell.
3. afore ye gang awa. “… before you go to war.”
Lauder’s only son, John, a captain in the 8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was killed in the war in France in 1916. Lauder entertained the troops in the front lines and his efforts in organizing concerts and fundraisers raised $1m pounds to help servicemen return to health and civilian life, for which he was knighted in 1919.
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