Poems from “You Can Be the Last Leaf”

Apr 4

Written By Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (Tr. Fady Joudah)

APRIL 4, 2023

Lovers Swap Language

the way enemies exchange stabs:
he takes a word from her lexicon
and she takes one from his book.
That’s how poems are made
and also bigoted speeches.

And when lovers and enemies sleep,
the ether carries a hot hum
the universe digests unaffected.

We Could Die in a Traffic Accident

Or after a long protracted illness that makes others wish us dead.
A flash food might do it after heavy rain.
A forgotten bomb from a previous war
or a fresh bomb from an ongoing one.
A virus heretofore unknown.
Or a well-known virus that doctors and pharmacists got bored with
and missed its reappearance.
We might stop breathing: there are too many of us on the planet.
Or in a famine our spouses will eat us.
And in excess our arteries will clog up.
Smoking kills.
Lack of pleasure.
Too much sex.
A fire from a scented candle.
A depressed driver.
A jealous husband.
A rookie burglar.
And we could die of waiting for death.
Nothing new in any of it,
no insight or learned lessons.
Only the facts
in present and continuing actions.

I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope

Each time I hear that word
I recall the disappointments
that were committed in its name:
the children who don’t return,
the ailments that are never cured,
the memory that’s never senile,
all of them hope crushed
beneath its wings as I smash
this mosquito on my daughter’s head.

✺

The grieving have only the unknown.
It’s their only staple and inheritance.
Pain has no logic. All things redeem
the grieving except your rational questions.

✺

I wish that no one goes
and no one comes.
All going is a stroke of myth
and each return
a punctured lung.

✺ Published in “Issue 3: Reparation” of The Dial

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Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (Tr. Fady Joudah)

MAYA ABU AL-HAYYAT is the author of You Can Be the Last Leaf. She is also the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction and a contributor to A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. She is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. Abu Al- Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

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FADY JOUDAH is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He has published five collections of poems, translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Grifn Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.