This poem was published as part of Bayou Blues: Ecopoetics of the Gulf South, a collection of ecopoetry centered on Houston, Texas curated by Hurricane Season editor, Aarohi Sheth.
Yes, I contemplate the sea, what else is there to do?…to look at the sea is to become what one is.
— Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)
Video Credit: Maha Abdelwahab
We watch it: the sea diamonding
and our impulse to free it from time.
It was too early to worry about our coming
to steal from what had already been stolen:
the sea, a diamond spilling over our camera frames.
Here, we forget our cryptic names and dirty orbits.
Here: the rough calf, the cordgrass, carbon walled over.
And so, we must insist on creative labor
and creative labor only. Or the mouth
of the marsh again and again, which makes me think
of my mother. Her aging body at the oven,
undetailed and squirming for sleep.
It's no different from how, on every shore,
I choose the shell-mud before its waves.
I keep my head down. I seek wholeness.
I study what can and can't be filled. I contend
with the world of discreet edges and objects,
of stops and starts. Then I refuse it.
I am forever the girl of un-listening.
Even as the waves declaim the neck of a heron,
the wind blowing out my bushy bluestem,
I still pretend to not know the value in all this seeing,
in the dangerous black hole of the human eye,
where things go to disappear.
When I say SubhanAllah, I mean
that a single flap of a bird
can carry it to another city.
I mean that to be taken by the gulf
is to re-embellish fecundity.
In another country, I was without all this.
My wispy spine affixed the dust.
In another country, I cried about nothing
but my teenage-ness. I felt important
enough. All this to say: I have been asleep
the time it took to get here. It is not enough
to crave the body of a thing; I must offer up
the water of my own skin.