Requiem
BY SAFWAN KHATIB
Columbia University, ’19
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors List
1
I do not meet him
in a dream. We are wading
in some kind of rivulet.
& we cant leave
even if we
want to run off
for awhile only to come
back. I ask the boy
why he refuses to swim
or if he has ever thought,
when tired, to swallow
forever what stops
our imagining the field:
not water
itself but current –
or a broken clock
hung on a swirling cliff
too far behind me to see.
2
His eyes give him away.
The boy believes he has
swallowed not current
(or clock) but the thriving
field we cant
even dream.
He is wrong,
there are
no more
fields
of harvest here;
here is sick
& weeping. I
tell him this
until I am spinning
within him, lifting
away the glassy
folds of his stomach.
3
Angry at the familiar
emptiness of him I leave
like a haunting – or like wind
from a fan. I wade
again alone now
& the current (not a clock now)
speaks nonsense.
Why do
I hear
the current speak if I
have never heard it before?
But the current
does not speak. You –
you are speaking
and boy and rivulet,
one, are sprawled
out as my body over a blank
or blooming field.
4
You are speaking.
Soon soon nobody
will be
speaking loud enough
anymore.
