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Leptis Magna - A Collection

My father used to say

do not write of love,

nor grief, 

but daisies and hemlocks:

so slow their sway.

write of the

unfolding mist,

how the haze burned green,

swamp dew in a swollen sun.

do not write of us,

nor the fields

where we would sit:

leaf and light around us.

you would hold me

in the grass,

hold me then as you 

could never now. 

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all days are your days, my love.

some days are snatched violently

from your belly, but

all days are your days, my love.

For days and days

Effie, sometimes you hollow my body.

you pull my skin inward

(deepening without stretching)

until i am like air: 

full of all voices

and burning only

once.

Effie, sometimes you dip your head.

you lay your lips

upon my chest

and drink 

from me:

drink until

i am nothing.

Effie, sometimes you hollow my body.

for days and days 

you rouse in me

a white rain,

a too-big sky.

i am too full.

i am engulfed.

please, stop.

you have already

opened me and

drunken from me

and swallowed me.

You are within me, 

always. I see you,

alway, my sky-in-slow-falling. 

 

Oh Effie, sometimes you hollow my body. 

Last poem

I held her dying: sick, then

silence.

(she was so small in my arms)

April 22nd, 2021, 11:38 PM

what are you

supposed to do when someone 

hands you 

a poem and you 

know it is about how they

want to die. 

(in its hidden meanings, a mist rolled out and out: yellowed without light, and airless, and age-ached)

Death as an unclosed parenthesis

writing grief

is exorcism, he said.  

(it has not exorcized for

i love you now more than i have ever loved you, father. 

tiring grief

is wind, he said.

(wind—orphaned

from air, whispering through 

daisies-of-the-valley:

i love you now more than i have ever loved you, father.

i tire writing grief.

(i miss our memories,

your holding of me, which is not memory, more like

warm flowers       crumbling    

in the

wind

Leptis Magna 

You ain’t like the birds, not like a squirrel or a salamander.

You ain’t a wildflower (or a darkwoods either). 
Closest thing is a great ol meadow, I think. 
So open all things might pass through you.

(and you might know them in their movements

and they you, in your stillness. 

and you might think this beauty  

and you might share that beauty with me
on a bench in Leptis Magna where, it is said,
blood first kneaded into man; and where, 

it is also said, man first humbled himself to hill and sky. 



by Ezzat Abouleish

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Crazy