Workshop: Borders
→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 25: SPRING/SUMMER 2020
I tell the students to write using only images. For example:
a mile of sand glistens
waves wash each grain blue
a small boy lies between the two.
When I say ‘a small boy’ we all picture the same child
(the one who died) the one closest to us.
I fear the power of the image, how it changes nothing
except myself, how it is never just an image, how the boy lives
now under my bitten fingernails how
I live inside his grave, the great uncaring blue, womb
of the world. I have been told to be more
specific: is the blue a) a sea b) a chlorinated pool c) an eye.
I tell the students language paves the way to every death.
Be careful with your rhetoric, especially when it feels right.
We cannot be picturing the same child.
We lack the imagination. We never saw him, not his life
or his headline. We looked away to practice
self-care. The timeline is too dark. Netflix and erasure: a deluge
of icons and canned laughter and bright graphics
and that ba-boum sound that lets us forget
there have been many more children dead in riverbanks
or swallowed by the ocean, unphotographed
in the desert, blown to pieces in warzones
or caged by we the civilised “West,” land of the damned free.
I tell the students to move me, and hope they cannot
hear the desperation. Teleportation
is all any of us truly desire: to move
and be moved, in complete stillness, collapsing distances
with a word, a shriven glance, an image
of a poet, in this case a man, bearded, Arab—I mean kind of
dusky, a faded beaten sky—surrounded
by students pale & dark & bored & solemn & on their phones
because this is important, and so not, and ugh
their rickety peeling tables forming a square
around the man, his vain efforts at peeling back the ocean
the seething black and green, the froth and heave of it
to cradle the boys and girls that never got to be so alive
as to be bored by a poem, the gravid magic of rhythm
given form, la ilaha illallah wu Muhammadur rasulallah
and doing his best, I swear, his best, to be professional
to not put his head on the damp shifting sand
and beg the waves to sunder.
