MOHAMED MAHMOUD STREET

She walks across the ticket hall

draped in black, clutching a framed photograph

Llke a shield.

The son who  never came home

smiles at strangers as if from a window

shut in her heart.

She ascends to the light,

bearing her mausoleum of silence,

walks to where the mourners stand.

There’s a place somewhere near the kerb

where he stood - guns with

the small dark mouths of birds, aiming.

Every day she sees the hand that held the gun,

severed and alone

smaller than her son’s, perhaps

Buttoning a shirt, turning a lock,

steering a wheel, lifting a cup,

holding a hand, waving.

She imagines fingers unhinging,

selecting a spoon.

The injustice of stirring tea. 

EID AL ADHA, CAIRO 2013

Below me, the sheep fits the balcony like a shoe in a box,
He strains on rope, horns uncoiling, head lowered.

I hear him all night, bleating - a baby in a crib.

He knows these are the blood days.

I dream I set  him free, watch him float from the sixth floor, 

hover over the city. He  turns and turns in the scum of air,

serenades the fat belly of the moon,

his hooves click like knitting needles. 

In the morning, I hear the lift slam shut, its metal slide

the sound of  steel on whetstone.  His   dainty legs

clatter over marble  like dancing girls,

children lose  hands in his wool, 
flies gather like prophets. 
He is mechanical now,

head high, haunches shifting like a rowed  boat,

each step as if rehearsed, a king whose

noose is a slipped crown. Eye on the gibbet.

This is the last I see of him:
led past soldiers and barbed wire,
turning the corner, dignity mocking slaughter,
his silence a call to prayers. 

  

More of my poetry can be read on http://www.odyssey.com, http://www.chanticleer-press.com/, http://www.vivimusmag.com/poetry.html