They'll Say, 'She Must Be from Another Country' by Imtiaz Dharker
When I can’t comprehend
why they’re burning books
or slashing paintings,
when they can’t bear to look
at god’s own nakedness,
when they ban the film
and gut the seats to stop the play
and I ask why
they just smile and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’
When I speak on the phone
and the vowel sounds are off
when the consonants are hard
and they should be soft,
they’ll catch on at once
they’ll pin it down
they’ll explain it right away
to their own satisfaction,
they’ll cluck their tongues
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’
When my mouth goes up
instead of down,
when I wear a tablecloth
to go to town,
when they suspect I’m black
or hear I’m gay
they won’t be surprised,
they’ll purse their lips
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’
When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands
they’ll turn away,
shake their heads quite sadly,
‘She doesn’t know any better,’
they’ll say,
‘She must be
from another country.’
Maybe there is a country
where all of us live,
all of us freaks
who aren’t able to give
our loyalty to fat old fools,
the crooks and thugs
who wear the uniform
that gives them the right
to wave a flag,
puff out their chests,
put their feet on our necks,
and break their own rules.
But from where we are it doesn’t look like a country, it’s more like the cracks that grow between borders behind their backs. That’s where I live. And I’ll be happy to say, ‘I never learned your customs. I don’t remember your language or know your ways. I must be from another country.’
Other poems I enjoyed this week: (complete poem in link) "Because my mother was on a date with a man in the band, and my father, thinking she was alone, asked her to dance. And because, years earlier, my father dug a foxhole but his buddy sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug another for himself. In the night the first hole was shelled. I’m here because my mother was twenty-seven and in the ‘50s that was old to still be single."
"Remind me again—together we
trace our strange journey, find
each other, come on laughing.
Some time we’ll cross where life
ends. We’ll both look back
as far as forever, that first day.
I’ll touch you—a new world then.
Stars will move a different way.
We’ll both end. We’ll both begin.
Remind me again."
"In each inch of skin one finds thirty feet of nerves prepared to fire or fail, almost two hundred committed to touch, ten times as many dedicated to real, remembered, and expected pain. In a lifetime you will shed half your weight in skin, cells expended in the search for the pains you prefer or deserve."
"look at what i did: on the TV
the man from TV
is gonna be president
he has no words
& hair beyond simile
you’re dead, America
& where you died grew something worse"
Recommended Listening: River by Joni Mitchell
Links of the Week:
"I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down" -John Clare