Veronica Golos
i.
Love, what is your other name?
Who rides the red horse, the one that is smoke?
Who tramples the fields where words are tinder?
What makes us? I want it to be Love.
Come near
the naked man. A hood—over his head. His hands—tied behind him.
How to utter it?
What word could open my jaw?
Tanks bullets drones air-strikes starvation sanctions structural
adjustment programming poisoned land police truncheons torture harsh
up collective punishment cigarette burning water-boarding
My tongue splits.
ii.
From the Red Sea, from its salt water, in its warm shallow shoals,
…Behold!
Here are my good…dead
rising!
They rise between river and river, between sword and sword.
They rise between the hour of song and the hour of work
between the echo and its saying. They rise inside
the cup-shaped hollow of pelvis—they rise and ripen and never grow old:
Mohammad Omar Jawad Ali Selma Madia Fatima Suhad Hussein
Ahmed Salam Azad Aysha Maysoon Nuhad Faisal Raad Zaid Widad
Nuha Haifaa Amal Kifah Souad Fallujah Ramadi Diyala Basra Gaza
iii
My day is a froth out of which the dead rise,
these particular dead, the ones who come every morning in the middle of prayer.
They cushion my knees and follow my hand movements.
They are residue in all that I drink.
I place my forehead to the floor.
I fumble with the lyric, move my finger as a blind person
along its calligraphy.
It is written: I am cause—and comfort.
Veronica Golos won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize (Story Line Press) for A Bell Buried Deep. In her newest book, Vocabulary of Silence, (Red Hen Press, Feb. 2010) are powerfully wrought poems that witness and respond to the continued wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza—a mirror in which we see and hear the names of war’s dead, their ghosts, and ourselves. Most recently, her poems have been or about to be published in Drunken Boat, Pedestal, Pemmican, Press 1, Bridges, Squaw Valley Review, Meridians, and other presses.
