Infinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies
For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya
Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady;
she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree.
Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still,
but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees.
My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or,
“a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree.
I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I
forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree;
night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling
succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed.
How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling
of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree).
I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf.
Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree!
Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems —
well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees.
(Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.)
Lately, all I think about are trees.
Read this again to replace tree with refugee.
Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.
■
For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya
Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady;
she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree.
Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still,
but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees.
My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or,
“a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree.
I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I
forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree;
night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling
succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed.
How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling
of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree).
I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf.
Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree!
Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems —
well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees.
(Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.)
Lately, all I think about are trees.
Read this again to replace tree with refugee.
Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.
■
Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by the Bangladeshi American poet Tarfia Faizullah can be found in the December 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine. Around that time, over 700,000 refugees had fled Myanmar for Bangladesh to escape the Rohingya genocide, as referenced in this poem’s dedication.
A ghazal is an Arabic poetic form that consists of self-contained couplets, each of which ends on the same word or phrase (the radif). What is special about this ghazal is that in the second-to-last line, the poet asks us to re-read this poem replacing the radif “tree” with “refugee.”
How did you feel when you got to that line in the poem? Did you re-read the poem again? Why do you think the poet didn’t just write the poem with “refugee” in place of “tree” in the first place? How was this word play similar and different from yesterday’s poem replacing “gun” with “pun”?
One other trademark of the ghazal form is including the poet’s own name in the final couplet, like a signature, as Tarfia Faizullah does here.
Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!
— Ællen
Today’s poem by the Bangladeshi American poet Tarfia Faizullah can be found in the December 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine. Around that time, over 700,000 refugees had fled Myanmar for Bangladesh to escape the Rohingya genocide, as referenced in this poem’s dedication.
A ghazal is an Arabic poetic form that consists of self-contained couplets, each of which ends on the same word or phrase (the radif). What is special about this ghazal is that in the second-to-last line, the poet asks us to re-read this poem replacing the radif “tree” with “refugee.”
How did you feel when you got to that line in the poem? Did you re-read the poem again? Why do you think the poet didn’t just write the poem with “refugee” in place of “tree” in the first place? How was this word play similar and different from yesterday’s poem replacing “gun” with “pun”?
One other trademark of the ghazal form is including the poet’s own name in the final couplet, like a signature, as Tarfia Faizullah does here.
Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!
— Ællen