Second Prize!

Thanks for those who gave me their feedback below. I am happy to let you know that I won second prize at the Philadelphia Reading Series Open Poetry Competition! (Hurray!) I ended up reading You Lie and Unsinkable. I have also submitted Comfortably Numb and Piece of Damascus (this one for you, Ahmad) to the Poetry.com contest. Let's see what'll come of it...

Philadelphia Palestine Film Festival

I just found out about this today! You can still catch the last remaining few days. Here is the website:
http://www.philadelphiapalestinefilmfestival.org/
Selections:
Mai Masri, the director of Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, is going to be at its screening on Saturday May 21 at the International House at 7:00 p.m. She'll also be conducting a Master Class, titled Storytelling Over Time and Borders, the same day at 2:00 p.m. at the Scribe Video Center.
Also at the International House on Saturday at 3:00 p.m. is a series of shorts, including the provocative Diary of a Male Whore. And on Sunday May 22, Rana's Wedding is playing at 7:00 p.m. (same venue).
There's much more than this playing this weekend; check the website above for more details!

Now's the time to get opinionated!

Okay, tutti! I need your feedback again. I had asked you earlier (<--this is a link!) to help me pick poems for a submission; now I need your help to pick one for a competition. The competition is this coming Saturday (May 21), and there's even more material now to pick from. (There's more material to pick from than appears under the "Previous Posts" section to the right; the "Archives", below that, hold material all the way from November 2002. And if you click on any older post, even older material apprears, as if by magic, under "Previous Posts"!) I certainly do not expect anyone to go through it all; one way to sift it is perhaps to go to the results of "Round 1" (<--this is also a link!) which has links to each of the older "candidates". But I do hope, no matter how you do it, that you take the time and share your opinion. So, go ahead, dig in, and let me know what you think, either by leaving a comment, or by writing me an e-mail at archmemory@yahoo.com . And many thanks in advance!

You lie

(To my grandmother, on the third anniversary of her death)

Like a ceiling fan coming to a halt
Warmth dissipates from me;
The creeping anniversary sticks in my mouth
Like pine glue on Christmas ornaments.
I bring my fingertips to my nose
And inhale the stale smell of winter;
I want to write her, but all my boxes are hidden
Under stacks of paper towels and cherry jam.
A smile slowly comes into focus:
“This was the last picture of her.”
It hangs on the wall, bleeding softly under my day
Into a reminiscence of oily eggplant and talcum powder.
A fingernail scratches my back, and then another,
Until the dead skin is peeling off like lazy days in the heat.
“She’s still there,” you said. But you lie,
You lie because there is no comfort in a song;
Because her shoulders, when we were crammed in the back,
Smelled of mountains, and honey, and old flesh.
You lie because you remember the cluck of her tongue
Smoothing away the night.
Like the day isn’t coming,
And dawn is only a joke.

Stardust

To Obe

In two different orbits we circle now
Planets tethered to separate suns

In another dimension I float, I breathe
I speak where you cannot hear

We cross the earth telling the rest of the story
We intertwine like unraveling schemes

I glimpse the round of your head from a distance
From memory, scratchy and blue

I see you where you ought to be
In the absence I make you on the corner, on the street

But in another street you dwell now
One with an unfamiliar smell

The syncopated silences between us grow
Until nothing is left but retorts so delayed

They are rendered obsolete
A handle, an encoded song

Is all the dust that remains
From the burst stars we became

© Copyright 2010 Obeida Sidani

And you wonder why?

According to an article in MSN Health & Fitness - "Is Your Town Down?", "Philadelphia has earned the melancholy distinction of being America's most depressed city"! No wonder I am, too!

Revelations

To Roland

We are absorbed
like stars consumed by the sky.
Sand under your feet,
it smelled of youth
and before
of fear,
of an embrace in frantic streets
where people were running for cover
and you covered my ears.
Sulphuric was the smell of my childhood.

A vacant stadium,
a wall of bags,
a storm spun of running,
and stars we were.
When the roads unfolded
we deflowered the city
one corner at a time.
You held my hand and told me,
“This is the city of my grandfather,”
and I inhaled it so I won’t forget.
You lit the church in candles
and walked the line of an old song,
a hokey dream you wrote on sand
and then watched retraced.
The tree where we once stood
twisted in the heat of abandon;
the rooftops drizzled that humid night
and shed, like an old hairdo,
the folds of what we were
and were to be.

I stand here and hold you
in a crumpled box upstairs,
remnants of glitter under your eyes,
pieces of the sun stuck under our nails
like splinters of the cross.
Is my hair clogging the drain
when you shed at night?
Is my smell still stuck under your skin?
Is the beginning of it all suddenly tasting
like the end of days
when all was one
and bubbles spewed forth from our eyes?

Galileo

The void threatens from the edges--
“For you are childless,” she said
“You are godless,” she said--
And I fill it, like a stuffed crocus
--She said—
Spill the scribbles on its blankness
Like sidewalks in the rain
Hold it, your breath
For Jupiter will never make it to Galileo
And yet he yearns
That point of suspension will return
And so will he, so will he
Look it’s coming to an end.

Essential parametric moments

“An essential parametric moment”

“You used to smile more,” she said.
“Yes, I did.”

------------

“I witness”

I watch from a distance
The surge of red and white on the streets
A flood of sweat and song
And rekindled hope
--cruel hope!—
And echoes of billowing sails
And a bearded youth

------------

“She was a good woman”

She’s gone
A cold slab in a sea of stone
A lonely bed in a desolate park
Gone is the collar of her dress
The color of her wrinkles
And the smell of her smile
That I loved to sink in

------------

“What is the nature of that sill?”
“That is snow.”

Tell her I’m yellow
I am drowned in the
Guck of life
And life is a--

Things

"There are things you lose you do not get back. You cannot have them, ever again, except in the smudging carbon copy of memory. There are things that seem irreconcilable that you must find a way to reconcile with. The simple passage of days dulls the sharpness of pain, but it never wears it out: what gets washed away in time gets washed away, and then you are left with a hard cold nub of something, an unlosable souvenir.A little china dachshund from the White Mountains. A shadow puppet from Bali. Look--an ivory shoehorn from a four-star hotel in Zurich. And here, like a stone I carry everywhere, is a bit of someone's heart I have saved from a journey I once made."

Peter Cameron, "The Weekend"

Unsinkable

(I watch life through a screen,
Pretending that it was mine.
Tell me, how do you pity
Yourself without drooling?)

A still, a perfect calm
Dusty wooden floors
And melting snow
A day that isn’t happening
Just gone by
He pauses on the phone
And in the silence I hear
A sniffle sucked in
Until it has dripped, like mucus,
At the back of his throat
“It began with the two of us
And it will end that way”
I just didn’t think
It would be so soon

Brush the lint off your breath
And try to look somewhere
But everywhere you turn
It is the last day of summer
I dropped a street, a city, a country
On my way to bliss
But bliss had no address
Why don’t you feather
Those darling tunes of yours
And whistle them by my side
For I have forgotten the taste of bread
And tea and sugar in the morning
Just dream, a little bit more,
And think that it didn’t happen
That it doesn’t happen, and will not happen
Just dream that the night pulled back
And the balcony is rife
With basil blossoms
And hands still brush
Over their sweet sunshine

Lazy

Another Sunday squirms by.
An ongoing march of inevitability
To another Monday I don’t care for.
I dodge more phone calls to people I don’t care about.
I am to construct something out of my banality;
Here it is.
It took another’s poetry
To cure me of mine.
Envision a cube, a horizon,
A camel bleeding to death,
A bunch of nonsense.
I indulge in my indolence;
I am shackled by it.
The cat doesn’t even care for me;
He is just sitting there because
He is too lazy to move.
A slow movie runs by,
A great ending I will never make,
“Don’t thank me
You’re doing all the work.”
A bus to nowhere,
A poem I will not finish.

(Teetering Over) The Abyss

I teeter over the abyss
And you loom large over me
Large and far
The cat is resting still
At the corner of the bed
And Wojtek snores beside me
My back is itching
And there’s no one to scratch it
And that is when I feel myself dangle
Far and large
Over its gaping void

Songs I don’t hear anymore
I can barely remember their names
You send me a world half-forgotten
And half indelibly not
Stuff it into an envelop
And rekindle the dying creed

The years have passed
Too many of them
And I have too
Now I await an envelop
And a hope
Of my return