They
lost each other in the war
he fled with the kids to the border
two years later
she made it to the refugee camp
he’d remarried
she became the second wife
The husband was a pharmacist
the multilingual doctor who delivered the news
was laughing
the worst catastrophe he said
makes you laugh
I never met the wives
The doctor would die later on
from an unknown illness
he knew what it was
the risk of stigma & loss
of income a brilliant clinician he was
for him death was
a thing that happens
As if a country I had
been building had come
crashing in a single life his life
Not country exactly but lots of small lives
Mr. Measure
Doc took photos seriously
unlike us in the predestined world
our spontaneous poses
he posed
as if his full being depended on it
as if it were a silent movie
(Flickr / Sigfrid Lundberg)
Do You Remember
that night the war ended
our weapons your war
the camp’s clinic was burned to the ground
our clinic your health
what had you secure-
ly there
Those who remain are
those who are maimed
the poem worked its fingers through your
bones
Economy of charity
a lending being lent
your distance
away from here
Luke Cool Hand I’m Your Father
Nurturing people into junkies
par for the course
pills & fear
& salt & sugar & grease
@the dollar store
They did have a choice
Softly killing them softly
@consumerist rates
science isn’t final
on a few points
If you want to smear smear
just don’t misconstrue me
I get paid well for it
& poets who get paid as much
wholly we listen to them
Don’t get all Che on me cheri
my patients “my”
as if I own them
as long as they’re nothing
but patients
& they me of course
they are called “lives”
This life loved you
that one got you a newsboy cap
gift card for fancy steak
or asked you to her house
or funeral
In tyranny there’s also love
as gesture & as such
compassion is easy
a deductible or co-pay
or who’d do this calling
“we-anoint-you-demigod”
a who’s who club
As for mass murder
it doesn’t need to occur
acutely in order
for it to be that
it’s not the hell one enters
but the hell one enters others into
& also enters
Flickr / emdot
Textu
Your spine a river into the forest
can’t tell the neurons for the trees
I light & light
you up with sound profile
threading the image habit
of pleasure
Conscience
When we learn how an infant in the womb
sleeps precisely in a parent’s pose
say with fist closed
pillowing the temple
What will become
of the poem
Credit: Fady Joudah, “They,” “Do You Remember,” “Luke Cool Hand I’m Your Father,” “Textu[“You spine a river into the forest”],” and “Conscience” from Textu. Copyright © 2014 by Fady Joudah. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
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Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His awards and honors include a Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, a PEN Center USA Award, and a 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize for his translation of Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan. He is a doctor of internal medicine in Houston, Texas.