as if I am sculpted
by your hands
I become new
to myself

a fresh vision,
unfamiliar
mirror
or lens

you refract me
differently

show me my
light from a
sideways
horizon

“I’d like to draw
your eyes,” you said.

“I would love to be
painted.”

And you laughed.

I am a Picasso
but rarer,
the goddess Justice
but fairer,
in your eyes

I am better

purified by unseen waters
the way you look at me
stalls my departure
feeds me a flavor I haven’t
tasted
teaches me something I should
have known, or knew
but forgot. You remind me
that tomorrow is today

the details don’t exactly
matter

if

love that went wasted,
love that faded or waited
too long to speak,
love that disappointed,
that lied by not disclosing,
love that neglected our origins,
love that belittled and bruised,
love that was refused,
love that liberated
has recycled itself
at the very center of the earth

to give birth
to this

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

desire, her promises and traps. expectations move to frustration, not satisfaction. why does chaos arise from need, from longing? there is some being here, some persistent soul that tells me this chaos must be, rushing a natural state of being. probably an unborn child, forcing its will upon me, crowding out my existing plans. to enjoy this year, to savor every moment of the developing future, days packed with laughter and growth, slowing down to notice that all i want is here.

the craze stalls as these words are written. there will be long walks, and trees, clouds, rocks. there is much to learn about love, her endless forms, innumerable. much to observe, artworks of cooking and poetry to embark upon. debts of love forgiven, discovering the unchanging–again. s l o w n e s s — a forgotten art. food, lovemaking, marriage. all that tastes better unrushed. the tarot, secrets of the stars, ancient ways were lost to me before i exhumed them. slowness, too, i will know well. i will become.

“at times, going slow is how to move fast”

© 2010 tahminah zaman

poems written and covered in leather
leaves bound in gold thread
high on laddered shelves

syllables cocoon around bodies
into a language of refuge

each new-soldered word
fighting the others for audience

whose history do these letters recall?
On whose grave does the tongue
of a speaker step?

What do beautiful words do?
Shelter us from outside view.

The key to any locked tower
is a word;
enclosed spaces promise privacy

if I learn your dialect
will you include me?

© 2010 tahminah zaman

i have only begun to learn. i have moved with resistance to change, escaped terrorist states of fear and boredom. i teach the little i believe i know to anyone who will agree to hear me. i have glimpsed the darker parts of my nature, claimed my faults alongside my desires. i walk into a purple sky bloomed from a mirror above my altar, i know nothing and relearn only through the movement of oxygen through my lungs. into my blood and out with my words, my gestures. i want the world to see me more clearly with every exhale.

i have only started to give. the stillness of these last years of solitude will remain with me, have stained my very bones, inhabit my memory. unable to forget now that nothing is permanent. nothing without its attachments.

the 28th year of life, beginning on the 27th birthday, brings a return of the planet saturn to its position at the time of birth. the somber realities of everyday life and the obstacles rising unpredictably into the moment make absolute necessities of non-attachment, non-reactivity, and either flossed teeth or an electric toothbrush. the saturn return is a time of weighty changes and a once-every-28-years opportunity to find inspiration in the mundane.

an altar and dedication to saturn will take place on the first saturday of my 28th year. the season of capricorn carries the winter solstice, a solar new year to be observed with a day of silence and a spirit of contemplation.

20 prayers for my 28th year of life:

1. a gentle, fruitful return of saturn

2. spiritual learning with my lover

3. happiness in returning to school

4. fortune, fame, and humility

5. a deepening of friendship and love

6. song, dance, beauty, and joy everyday

7. release and surrender

8. wisdom, balance, and integrity in all realms and endeavors

9. silence, manifestation, and understanding

10. patience, compassion, humanity, generosity

11. health, wealth, and tranquility

12. excitement, movement, LAUGHTER

13. a beautiful, safe place to live

14. security and peace in all areas of my life

15. unconditional love and remembrance

16. fluidity, creativity, stability

17. self-confidence, openness, mental acuity, endurance, sensuality

18. reconciliation, honor, forgiveness

19. togetherness

20. expansion, rhythm, communication, reflection

© 2008 tahminah zaman

© 2008 tahminah zaman

oaktown never guaranteed
nothing but
oak trees

oh momma momma i don’t give
a good god damn
i don’t give a good

i wake up late make my students
wait in the hall / forgot my keys
again feelin the breeze blowin
thru middle school doors
i teach spanish without a degree

you know what i mean
i be gettin away with shit
makin it look good
at the last moment
makin it taste gourmet

ay mommy mommy i don’t give a good
god damn
don’t give a good god damn

© 2008 tahminah zaman

each instant a demand. month to month. hand to lips. determined to struggle. the silence between moments makes what’s easy feel hard. makes the simple complex.

an exhaustion i can’t censor. juggling with three hands & still not enough. spread too thin. can’t hold the mosaic together. stretched across threadbare canvas.

even as one era ends, three others are coming into swing. the finish lines stack one against the other, obstacles set for muscles pushed to their limit. the missed hurdles swoop to the ground. they make a guilty thwack when they get there.

things slow & still there isn’t a second to lose.

                                          are prayers

                                          i’ve got to write

                                          before the ink & blood

                                          run out

                                          i’ve got to say one more thing

                                          before i die

it’s the distance the narrator takes that’s jarring. that he only speaks from “I” a few times in actual dialogue throughout the book.

he is speaking death. the concrete in between whose cracks life slips through. now & then. not every day. only the burden of vice is worth living for. coffee. sex. the occasional victory. the temporary evasion of death that is every living day in Beirut.

a militantly–but beautifully–oppositional narrative, darwish subverts every possible symbol that might tempt the reader to comfort herself with a thought of peace, justice, or escape. but this world is beyond (or below) any harmonious imagining even a reader most skilled in denial could construct around the events taking place in this story. darwish’s portrait of terror is bloodcurdling in its simplicity of language & demonstration of the workings of a sensitive & rational mind on the verge of psychosis–indeed, weaving in & out of altered states amid the chaos of “war” (genocide as usual). darwish shows us how a poet tells a story: line by line, strung like pearls on a chain of words.

                                the poet speaks death.

                                breathes not oxygen     but metaphor

he moves in a persona of madness. he has virtually no personality besides a half-joke he makes about women using makeup like coffee to wake up in the morning. reminiscent of the dry absence of the narrator in Camus’  L’Etranger, darwish uses madness as a weapon as well as to drive his words, jigging in spirals in the ears of the reader. the end comes wildly back to the first page, & the repetitions recalled their earlier iterations so strongly i thought i was trippin.

imagination replaces life. the poet repeats the images, asks questions unanswerable. does a bomb have grandchildren? US.

the poet speaks death. marks with Yemeni blood-rain the meeting of imagination, history, & poetry. he “shift[s] from martyr to spectator” (121) for “protection.” to protect himself, or the reader? his meta-narrative is haunting. it is as if a dead man writes this.

it’s certainly a possibility.

“darkness is white, pitch-white” (176)

life pushes through the cracks of the inevitable. “i am in the middle region between life & death” (181). “here, i didn’t die,” the narrator repeats as he surveys the city, the decade he spent there. the last pages come back to the first: “are you alive?”

in the final pages, darwish finally inserts himself by name (“Brother Mahmoud…”). perhaps his privacy is the code to this work. his spectatorship is so painfully detached that it is as if the shoes of Memory for Forgetfulness are empty of feet. the sardonic, tragic, mad, dizzying poetry lies in darwish’s many tones: absurd, prophetic, unconcerned. subtle. his detachment is, well, maddening.

while the character is absent, the poet is definitely there.

                                                   can i

                                                 manifest you

                                                          –poems, july/aug 2007

© 2008 t zaman/N.A.M.A.A.Z