AIAW Featured Poet: ESTHER KAMKAR

Esther Kamkar - Poet

After releasing the lion-head knocker,
I plead:
Door, open for me. Let me in,
to the other side, where language is easy
and flowing, so I can tell exactly what I smell,
the colors I see, and the way sunrise in the milky
sky takes me to a crib, to a baby just woken up.
I beg:
Blue door of the poem, open for me.
Invite me to enter, to bring all my cicadas
with me. I don’t know what else to do
with them, where else to put them.

So easy to make friends with the women
of the world. We tell a story, we listen,
and we understand – a story of longing
and loss, stories of our children
and our parents, a story of exile.
Easy movements over the globe
on steady old feet.

Having no care
having no history
in the land of History,
earthquakes, and volcanic
explosions, I collect
one by one, hot black stones
on the black beach, only to keep
them by my side for the day,
and by dusk to give them back
to the sea, stone after stone.

From the old port
according to their own timetable
fast ferries of grief
arrive and dock.
They turn off their engines
and unload their cargo.

This is how love should be:
un-exotic, not a rarity, or oddity,
common as wild fig trees by the roadside,
as common as geraniums
in olive oil cans, as common as salt
from the sea.

They tell us about the gods, the goddesses,
the temples and the marble columns,
but for me cicadas are the gods of Acropolis.
Their incessant mechanical song,
all day, all around the hill.
Alone
in the circle of cicadas
I listen.
In the intense heat,
I listen to them
singing their song
about their days in the trees.

Esther Kamkar 9/2007

Red-Raft Woman

In another country
at the edge of the river
I talk to the red-raft woman:
Ask me and I’ll tell you
about my sister.

How we grew old without
each other’s stories,
how our children never
slept like seals side by side
on Grandma’s living-room floor;
her children never asked me
for midnight pancakes.

Red-raft woman
make me a map
and I’ll show you
where I was years ago -–
Buffalo, Niagara Falls.
No one ever told me
about the sound -–
how it vibrates and embraces you.

The joy of holding my sister
after twenty eight years,
the silence after the Falls.
What roared in me was
the grief-sound of absence.

O, and her granddaughters,
the mountain slope and wild poppies
behind her house, and her garden
blooming with tea rose from Kashan.

Esther Kamkar 2007

Separate Corners

It happens that a mother becomes samoon flatbread
and fills the bellies of her hungry
children. That she becomes thick adas lentil soup

and sticks to the ribs of her hungry children.
Sells her body to a stranger in a corner of one room.
That she makes her three children stand in separate corners.

That she wishes to be dead, washed and clean.
No, better washed away in the river that divides their city.
That her children press their chests to walls, foreheads

on folded arms as if playing hide and seek,
and start counting and counting.
That they imagine melting into the corners
the way cream and honey in their mouths will.

Esther Kamkar 1/2009

Sufi Café Sign in Red Ink
Mountain View, California

No kissing around, please —

Surely it means lips
on lips, not

lips on elbows,
or lips on temples,

or on fingertips,
so, I ask for permission:

may I kiss the corner
of his eye, the doves

of his eyelids
or his vest

over the garden
of his heart,

his spoon and coffee cup,
the hem of his coat,

the thirty birds
of his torso

the helix of his ear,
his ear, as I turn

turn and twirl
a dancing strand

of wool on his scarf,
and my hand a spindle?

Esther Kamkar 7/2008

What I Mean When I Say Memory

    A song:
    Kiss me
    Kiss me
    with the breath
    of a sponge diver.

Little dirt-color lizards
Enamel squares on a silver ring
All sixty-four sections in a sidewalk tile
Bread and goat cheese at Homer’s Tomb
Thickness of glass bottles

    A song:
    What if I had six
    hands to hold you.

Cactus and prickly pear
Hand-knockers on blue doors
Blade of a bay leaf
The oldness of things
I am here with you and I notice you.
A fifteen-day detail on the landscape,
I buy bread and swim in the sea everyday.

    A song:
    I come to you
    with empty hands
    and you fill
    them with sand
    and sea water.
    A monument
    slips through my fingers.

Perhaps the smallness of things,
the short distances, the relentless
heat and the lighthouse in Akritori
want to invite me towards the shores
of memory, east of this.

Esther Kamkar 10/2007

When Being Full is Not Enough
                                                        from my daughter’s dream

I water the young
roses with rusty leaves —
the bird-feeders are empty,
and the gray bird has lost its tail.

The Mesopotamian Crows
of Ba' qubah caw-caw me their story:
    No one eats the river carp anymore,
    the fish feed on rotting corpses.

I have the recipe for grilled carp
from Muhammad Al-Baghdadi's
seven hundred year old cookbook
I tell the Crows.
Enough of your stories now.
I need to go back to my own dream:
Wings sprouting out of my armpits
growing larger and flapping
until my body stirs to lift up.
Go away Crows.

In the garden to water
the coral bells and columbine
I hear the white-cheeked Bulbuls,
the singers of Baghdad:
    Have you ever seen
    a grieving mother donkey?
    How she brays and hits
    her head on the wall for hours.

Don't bring me such stories Bulbuls,
I beg them.
No stories of suitcases and borders.
No trophy skulls.
No soldiers weeping in their beds.

Esther Kamkar 4/2008

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