The 2012 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival runs for the 2nd-4th November, and for the next week, Ink Sweat & Tears will be featuring poems on the theme ‘Poetry as a Lifeline’ which is the subject of the IS&T-supported Discussions and Short Takes this year. Today’s poem is from Fady Joudah who is appearing at the Festival. Find out more about the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival here
Tenor
To break with the past
Or break it with the past
The enormous car-packed
Parking lot flashes like a frozen body
Of water a paparazzi sea
After take off
And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly
Because the kittens could survive
Under the rubble wrapped
In shirts of the dead
And the half-empty school benches
Where each boy sits next
To his absence and holds him
In the space between two palms
Pressed to a face
This world this hospice
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American physician whose first collection The Earth in the Attic (2008) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He translates Zaqtan Ghassan, who appears on this site on 3rd November.