Poems by Sarah White

 

In Syria

The Prison was so dark that God couldn’t see
what was happening within the walls.

He couldn’t see the flecks of mold
on the half-cup of bulgur each prisoner ate each day, 
couldn’t see Ahmed made to sit on a platform, a woven cord around 
his skinny neck. When the chair was kicked 
from under him, his broken body, too light to fall, 
swung from side to side until a guard pulled him downward.
And, as his neck was about to snap, he whispered to the guard:

“God couldn’t see what
was happening here,
but soon I will meet Him
and tell Him what you did.”

 

The Fable

My first and only spouse was very handsome.
I supposed he’d be an honest man as well, for at the time  
I had not heard the ancient fable 
that says a handsome person’s virtue might be feeble.

THE FABLE: Truth and Falsehood, fighting on the sand 
with their machetes, lopped off one another’s head. 
Each one, groping to restore himself,
found the head and face of the other,
blindly put it on, and since that day,
Truth has worn the ugliness of Falsehood,
Falsehood vice versa, and so on.
. . . 

Thus, I didn’t realize (though now I do)
the ruses my suave spouse was given to
long before I, his partner, ever knew,
to win a woman he craved
and claim her as Wife Number Two.

I have not asked, nor have I cared
how their married life has fared.

But over the years, some worthy men  
have made their way into my ample bed.
Finding it a lovely place, 
each with his kindly, homely face
has returned there many times again.

 

Something Like a Face

It’s not a camel, whale or weasel. It’s a cloud
that floats unthinkingly (I think) above the path
in Hamlet, a play I love a lot. One summer,
the young prince and a docile girl do not voice
their deep attraction, but chat forlornly in an absence—
avoiding the embrace that might bring blessing.

Nor did I, at their age, know what a blessing
was but walked from place to place with clouded
scowl, seeking quiet, distance, absence
even when I’d heard, somewhere along the path,
warm murmurings and amicable voices—
others home from school for a true summer.

No one wrote a play about me—not that summer,
not another. I read Dickens—my one blessing–
At least I heard the sound of my own voice
laughing at the Boffins and Veneerings.  But clouds,
too scattered, never formed an even path
to follow through the world.  Absence

usually surrounded me. Distance, absence,
no one home, but in the summer
words grew tall as lilies and formed a path
to the kitchen where it seemed a common blessing
(Pater Noster) could time the cooking, and cloud
the kitchen with hot steam until your voice

said “I’ll be Damned! The corn is done!” Voice
of August evening. Presence took its turn with absence,
rivers of salt, steam in the clouds
were promises of past and present summers
a season to invent some blessings.
Friends—fix up a six-line package as a path 

from some forest to another path—
While my balance is quite poor, there are voices
from the other side, sorting stories, blessing
whatever happened to curb absence,
promise found, presences and summers
oiled and salted—a many-banded cloud.

Clouds of blessing shade and shape the path.
In summer, absence speaks in a peculiar voice.

 

Hamper

One of some hundred words pertaining to the field of laundry
where “hamper” sits and waits behind the tongue
 to be summoned into a brain space 
in which it can bide time, (surrounded by
strangers like “negligé” with which it has little 
in common.) A verbal companion
slips in beside the noun and is likewise 
learned. Lord knows I have been hampered
myself, long before I knew how to say it
or even how much i was somebody’s 
creature:

 … like a cat at the window gazing
up at a wren on a limb, wishing to feel
the wings flap, yet finding a glass window 
and several feet of vertical distance between
self and songbird.  In any event 
 hamperedness is not the whole story. The story
 is words—how many there are, how they
must have formed themselves by the thousands
in Sanskrit times. Then pouring down over the 
mountains into what is now Europe they came,
often becoming one another’s in-laws, not always 
getting along, but always gathering
meaning. Verbal companions call on one
another and are seldom rebuffed.  Yes, Cause,
you may be my fourteenth Cousin, according 
to one scholar in my department, far-fetched
as he is, (his name is Frank. He claims
descent from Charles the Grand and no 
one has the heart to deny it, especially since
he grew that frightful beard). Meanwhile,
the cat gives up and descends from the window 
to enjoy her non-verbal breakfast.