Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

Ode: a portrait of god as a photograph of Gaza

After Motaz Azaiza

 

You cannot look at it.
It is like looking into the sun.
It cancels sight.  Afterwards
perhaps you begin to see
fragments, small cold islands
of the recognizable, membra
disjecta, phosphene ghosts,

 

in the splatter of old coffee stains,
coil and tatter of silly string
looped, hanging from the branches
of some small shrub in the park
dangling towards the ground—

 

or in the tiny corpses of hatchlings,
flung from the nest to smash
on the baking sidewalk,
whose nakedness crisps
to cracklings for any ant or fly—

 

and yes, when you sit anywhere
on some cooling summer evening
on a bench in Brooklyn while
all around you the world
moves—as the Mr. Softee truck
swings around the corner
tinkling its Hamlin ditty,

 

as a dragonfly stutters into traffic,
as the air trails light fingers down
your neck your arm and through
your hair and you see everywhere
the people walking in American
ease, in unbroken flesh,
bloodlight shining warm and flush
arms swinging fluid,
easy,  dimple of elbow
intact, and the soft sweet skin
behind the knee—

 

how to love the dead as much
as I have loved these, all the living—
and how now to love the living
whose wholeness can only ever
suggest the closed eye
the single unbroken ear
and an orphaned pair of lips
pursed, curved, in disdain

 

and all around       the dark stain
the splatter        the loop and tatter
the tangle and droop    of an elbow
no longer an elbow    of the neck
leading nowhere like a blind alley
of the hair nestled like a sleeping
animal between a mis-matched
pair of feet        of the knee
that has grown a new mouth,
open gaping as if frozen
in the attempt to proclaim
one last red word—god, tell me

 

what is any word but blood?
Look, the newborn drones
circle joyously in the bluest sky
true servants to the Word
patched through to them
by the highest angels hovering
in geosynchronous orbit.
Look, within each bullet
a praisesong to the lord
of hunger and fire.  Tell me

 

again that you see the sparrow.
Tell me again how you see
each death and keep your silence.
What was your name, oh hidden one?
What was your domain, oh voice
from the burning, oh gourmand
of burnt offerings?  Plague-giver,

 

smiter of first-born, I heard once
that you appeared as a cloud
of unknowing, as a darkness
unknowable, a murder of black
wings.  Surely then this is your
final altar, this graven image,
this grave.            Of the skin,
death-darkened.  Of the clotted
light.  Of the lips curved in a snarl.
Of the snarl and knot of children’s
limbs.  Surely this is your name.

 

Sam Cha was born in Korea. A Pushcart Prize winner, he’s the author of a long chapbook, American Carnage (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2018), and a collection of genrefluid poem-essays/essay-poems, The Yellow Book ([PANK] Books, 2020). Long a resident of Cambridge, he lives in Brooklyn with his family.

 

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx