Before the Storm

Before the storm
was the neatness of Spring
the Crabapple tree
young again
starred in its one useful role
and marked the yard's center point
the bluegrass a razor cut jade
hemmed and tucked into concrete cuffs
swingset counted a Haydn waltz


We were born to the prairie and knew
when sirens sliced the yeastless air
the drilled bare feet procession
toward the screen door
corralled by thunder that snapped the cerulean sky
like one of our parent's electric arguments
eruptions that made us skip a few steps down
to the sanctuary of ground


The weatherman blinked back
his arrowed arms like a weathervane
spun into confusion
vortices circled like distant hawks
Somewhere out in East Jesus, Mom chuckled
somewhere outside our metropolis of 130,000
somewhere in the safety of the unknown


In those times we held fast to normal
Dad chased a hairy brown coconut
across the floor with a hammer
Mom with a basket of laundry to fold
as our world unfolded
Perry Como instructed us to find refuge


Don't let the stars get in your eyes
don't let the moon break your heart
don't linger too long in the light of the moon
too many moons could change your mind


Warnings wrapped in a polka
garnished with a post-war victory smile
that made us believe
the roof would always hold


But the time sequestered
and the temporary no-fly zone
over blankets on the basement floor
didn't save us from the storm


Yasmeen Najmi

The Tipping Point

I am only half of you
half of your subcontinent skin
my autumn-stained hair
half your ink and girth


My stories are served to me
on small plates
my stories are only half of yours


The low hum of your words
lifts and tilts in quiet waves
through the savanna of your chest
the steeped air swoons cardamom
and I am running with you
in mud washed streets
your grandmother's fried puri crunches
then fills the mouth in oily plumes
the way my grandmother's surely must have tasted


My stories are the Other castes
that wait outside the temple
shout devotion at stone to be embraced by echo
in the flickering tango of shadows
we enter
fold our bodies and breath into maternal contours
shell cracked to source
rifts in ancient masonry
cull the heat of severance


Fingers of moon slip between
window bars
the arcs of twisted limbs
I imagine that your stories are mine


Yasmeen Najmi

Pedernal

You're the temple of our Aztlan
a longitudinal misfit
like the estranged, and sometimes strange
who orbit your shadow
I lose alignment in your symmetry
in the black lace of a woman
who too survived 1000 molten deaths
your snow streaked hair visible to those
with you in the early light
do they know that underneath your seasons
the fires that cast you as Juliet's breast
still burn at puberty's rim
pushing orchids and trumpet flowers
through the ash of your lovers
gathering loamy clouds to listen
to the new stories simmering in your skin
our dark goddess
standing square in a strange brew
black brush on mosque skies
steady against the frenzy of lights
Pedernal, they are kinder
to your red and yellow-haired sisters
but you and I know the truth
whichever temple they built to mask
their devotion.


Yasmeen Najmi


Cerro or Mt. Pedernal is located near Abiquiu, New Mexico

Gulf Ghazal

One evening I was listening to the public radio recordings of a Louisiana native and naturalist who mentioned the concept of a "thin place," which he defined as a physical place on the landscape where the veil between this world and next is thin - a place you understand intuitively. I so liked the concept/words that I wrote a poem around it. May we all find a thin place(s) in this world.


On dry stripes between the feral bayous and rivers, they came to build, grow in thin places. Life delivered in ritual tides, geologic gifts that oozed between plank floor toes, thin places.

The ashy, skirted frames of bald cypress and tupelo gum slumped like old women, dripped in antebellum lace of moss that filled dikes of sunlight, closed the thin places.

A fiery sun thundered to sky, eclipsed dark, earth's blood crept to shore staining, straining shells, wings, the sickled marsh grass - settled in all those thin places.

Thinking it was night again, eels left their watery nests among the breathing roots that held the world together, darting, twisting in the flow through thin places.

Fisherman, the anointed soldiers of Goddess Yemanja, pried the paralyzed from gluey graves, wound new levees like chastity belts around shores, dark clouds and truth spun below thin places.

Old Joe at Boutte's Bayou smiled, "Sorry, all I can fix you now is a beef po'boy sandwich. Cleanin' the oil is like gettin' gum off yo shoe," he cackled, missing teeth showed roux thin places.

His mouth slowly waned, eyes fixed in a distant, smoky glaze, he said "Yasmeen, the people in Lafitte or Theriot or anywhere round here, in these prowling bayous we know our thin places."


Yasmeen Najmi


Published in Fixed and Free Anthology of New Mexico Poets, 2012. All rights reserved (Yemanja is a mother goddess in the Yoruban tradition. She represents water - mud, swamps and ocean).

Lost in Translation

Power lies in determined translation
of the tangled synapses
of costumed memories
filed as "unknown:"
emergent headstones.

Stationed in the headlight,
the whistle warns approach
is the engine love or fear?
Dopplered heartbeats deafen
the answer
we load thoughts into chambers
click...click...click
tongue quivers like a teapot door
hinting the sonic landscape
and, in a moment,
the mind's valve flies open to sing
exposing, bathing us in the white
rays of a smile
opening pores to light
or, in storm cold shot
slams shut
blood dives to reef
fear is the fighting fish
that picks the bones,
refracting love
pigmenting rage
power not exercised
love not exiled
by the bullet or fist
only a word.

Yasmeen Najmi

Foreigner in Exile (Ghazal)

We live to drink our patria's wine, all those sired in exile,
Chicken Tikka Masala and English ghazals we claim in the style of exile.


The ink of the story still bleeds past the partition of the page,
The lines tightly drawn, my union thwarted by a father’s files of exile.


But who to blame? The terrorist or the Government Babu? Their cloth and shackles same. The smoke led to my door, and Churchill’s men recline in exile.


My passport was once the global key, our righteous moral badge,
The eagle plucked, its talons clipped, it soared high in exile.


The birth cord's been unraveled, why must they burn the map and ship?
This daughter's hopeful welcome, without a smile they did exile.


Yasmeen, why weep for a place not home, to you as yet unknown?
Go and flash your dollars in a stranger place, from yourself again find exile.



Yasmeen Najmi

The Flamenco of Seasons

In Spring, love bursts in noisy bulerias,
a pale, downy blur that ripens to a bare skin,
petal lip alegria,
oh fermented eyes of the sugar drunk harvest
the adagio of a hammock
under swaying fruit
but true love resides in winter's silencio,
when we must lean in, whisper
and be still to hear the heart's yearnings,
glimpse the veins of hope that stream beneath
the glazed layers of seasons.


Yasmeen Najmi