Hannah Fathi

  I will never know What passes through her mind as she scoops Dripping wet sand and bunches of kelp And hurls them toward the blackening ocean. Or know her inner thoughts as she sings Her invented tunes quietly under her breath, And picks flowers, indelicately, Frantic to gather as many as she can fit In her small clenched hand.  There are worlds she creates Which I will never see, or even know Existed in her fantastical young mind. And every day she is farther from me.

I see it now: Our lives have been spiraling towards this, Ready to converge in a single word I can't reclaim. Like the moon's gravitational pull  Makes the oceans swell to her, Your being moves me In ways I can't control. I lie awake, with all of time Expanding and condensed, Thinking about milliseconds  That mean the death or life of everything. Is this how god felt when she wondered What word to use to breathe life into the universe? Did she, too, question the right intonation, And agonize over the ramifications Of saying that word at all? Maybe now she looks upon her creation  And wishes she held her tongue. 

How did you end up here? Out in the middle of this river Alone in your little wooden canoe Watching ethereal mist rise To shroud your world In the haltingly beautiful But cold fog of the forbidden And precarious future. You've been on this river for a lifetime. Paddling with all your might Through the lethal rapids, Steering your bow with sober resilience To rest in the deep green pool Of hard-earned sanctuary. You sacrificed passion-- You put your youth behind you For calm water and clear skies,  An escape from ghostly mist And white-crested turbulence And all the fallen branches that For so long marred your path. But you ignored all that, And left in the early morning  Forgetting your shoes,  Carrying every burden Of your uncharted future  Onto the silver-curtained river And its inexorable violent current.

You heard once that heaven Is to this world like this world is   To a reflection of trees in a pond, The mirror image just an imitation And a murky one, of the real and glorious Earth we know. And that we are always longing for that Real world, that heaven, Where things are even clearer, Never feeling fulfilled here among the oaks. But when I sit under the branches Of an ancient twisted evergreen And smell jasmine on the wind  And hear the laughter of my children Holding their soft cheeks to mine I think that, really, this must be heaven. How could anything be more glorious?

Nothing is divine. Not the fawn's nativity in late spring, Consecrated by dark fragrance  And baptized in bright stars. Not the coastal redwood, bathed in white mist, Twisting high in supplication To the meager sunlight. Not even her body, soft as the rain, Grounded in the earth and rising To meet his ardent prayer.  The God of the Rainbows turns his grim face From the faithful child's final plea, So nothing is divine.  

Was I the cause of the unraveling? The catalyst of the rising seas   And wildfires raging through your hearts? Your souls were desiccated, Like trees, their leaves wilting and tiny bubbles In their trunks screaming of the drought. And there I was with the water You so desperately craved.  Ahead, I saw the glacier And knew of its melting. But you couldn't see its retreat-- You stood in the middle of the shrinking mass Proclaiming its strength and vitality,  While I held the burning torch.