The Storyteller Speaks to a Bird about Dying
To the caged, wings seem like an illness. But I cannot
bother my own body with these questions too much—whether
I feel less winged or more winged. Whether the birds
and the angels know something I do not. I open
a book to the light of this cold April morning and hear
you warbling outside my apartment window compelled to share
your poetry with me; and I understand your pre-occupation,
as well as what you are asking me to do. In years
of oppression, says the Iranian proverb, even birds die
in their nest.[i] This is to say, that no other living thing desires
so keenly to be totally released; greater, then, the consequence.
To the free bird, illness seems merely a dream. Perhaps,
this is our present universal paradox: no one really knows
what they want until that fleeting minute right before a death.
Maybe, we should all practice dying more often—yank
at the pivots, warm the muscles, sing our final notes into our darkest
hours, wake up the next morning a brand-new song again.
ثاء
On Wanting to Be Significant
a ghazal
No, nothing—if nothing—if call, if—nothing—if caw, then nothing—
hand, help, time—nothing—if pray, pray nothing—
say God, if nothing—in-part, or nothing—be not as nothing—
is wind for nothing—freeze tears—give nothing—
reframe—speak nothing—hold up, but nothing—like this is nothing—
for real, there’s nothing—amen, my nothing—
amen, my nothing—above is nothing, below, be nothing—
my soul, keep nothing—your words make—nothing—
your words: no, nothing—a word—is nothing—is word for [nothing]
for [ ] for [ ] [ ] [ ].
JOURNAL ENTRY written WHILE the First Saltmarsh Sparrows of Spring Visit My Window
for a lover, March 24th
In a year unknown, a woman takes her life. Maybe she lingers; maybe she finishes swiftly. What a cruel
knife love is in both its presence and absence. Today, the tides are fighting for the shoreline. I can
hear them slapping up against the rocks even from several miles away as though they contain many
voices—ghosts. My shadow goes missing inside the darkness of this apartment. I imagine she used a
cloth or rope as I read the brief description of Qabbani’s loss, a young boy who would become a
future poet, a man penning wildly on behalf of women in Syria. Simply put, someone I do not know
and know little about, but whose poetry entrances me; Love Letters he calls them, the poems. I want to
tell you about this, lover, how his sister haunts him. How, in each woman he writes of—their bodies
full of fire, form, and foolery—I hear his child heart breaking and burying itself in her dark eyes and
breasts. Wissal, it beats. I will find you. She does not answer back, her spirit floating above a firmament,
her body shrouded in the past. I want to say that I have never been her, that when he speaks, “All the
white doves / That will carry / Your wedding dress / On their wings,”[xix] I do not feel my body lifting
as a piece of torn tissue, blood splattered and broken from expecting any other outcome. In our youth
we yearn for connection, utter secrets in the ears of the people we trust, believe that flowers are a sure
sign of affection, poetry seeming reasonable even when nonsensical. I don’t imagine that, then, you
would have told me my mind needed mending, or even thought to utter the word disabled as if the way
I walked through an open field, talking as I went, ceaseless, were indication of affliction[xx] —you beside
me listening because this is how to be beside me. Now, you try to change me. You need a trail of logic
like tiny pieces of freshly baked bread because you are hungry, because “[l]istening” to fractured
banter, says Frank, “is difficult,” an illness stor[y] mix[ing] and weav[ing] different narrative threads.”[xxi]
I understand your need for coherence, but grief and trauma are never linear that way. I can’t feed you
more than water and salt—the cyclical waves pounding against a body of sand. Wissal refuses to marry
a man she doesn’t love, and her brother becomes her afterlife plumbing a woman’s perspective—her
point of view. We all deal with our traumas in our own way. I see you doing the same each time you
turn away from me, then turn toward me, naming me for this motion, a coping, illogical as poetry. Are
you less abled too? Everything is poetry. I think. A grasping for speech, a language we hope others will
hear and understand. See how Wissal’s voice, “like a green bird,” breaks Qabbani’s heart over and
over again—ah love “washing [him] with the rain of [its] tragedy.”[xxii] I peck at his language to weave
my own grief, asking to please join their discordant conversation.
________________________________________________________________________________
[i] The Iranian proverb, “In years of oppression even birds die in their nest,” was taken from Grace Goodall’s, “Bird Lore
in Southwestern Iran.”
[xix] Nizar Qabbani, “Love Letter Four,” Arabian Love Poems.
[xx] Say Freedman and Combs, “When [people] are approached as objects about which we know truths, their experience is
often one of being dehumanized. They can feel like machines on an assembly line. Also, even though a pill or a procedure
may make a person function better, she may think worse of herself [...] as broken or defective because the medication
was ‘required’ for their functioning,” (Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, pg. 21). As Herman asserts
in Trauma and Recovery, a victim of trauma must feel that she is the one presiding over the discovery of her own narrative
and condition, not having it imposed upon her by individuals from outside of her experience who do not possess integral
knowledge of her suffering, (pg. 158). This knowledge is often ascertained in therapy, that Freedman and Combs argue,
should remain narrative in its focus so as not to pathologize the victim in her confusion and grief. Dina Shulman, when
speaking of her own recovery and adoption of the narrative therapy model writes, “When reading literature of a
pathologizing nature, I found myself once again awash with pain and pessimism,” but, when reading of narrative therapy
approaches, she says, she was left with “a feeling of optimism.” “Problems,” she asserts, “entrench you with pain, while
stories allow for possibilities” and “[...] when one gets a chance to reflect on one’s own life, choices multiply, instilling
excitement at the realization that the preferred outcomes are within one’s grasp,” (Freedman and Combs, Narrative Therapy:
The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, pg. xii-xiii). Given the opportunity to reflect and nourish her own story, a victim
may feel empowered by diagnostic naming of her condition if this diagnosis comes to her via discovery and in the context
safe relationships (such as a trusted therapist), allowing her to “[discover] that there is language for her experience” and
that “she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways” as well as the necessary realization that her symptoms and
condition are “normal responses to extreme circumstances,” (Herman, Trauma and Recovery, pg. 158).
[xxi] Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, pg. 76.
[xxii] Nizar Qabbani, “Love Letter Eighty-Eight,” Arabian Love Poems.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, as well as the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications) with books forthcoming from Texas Review Press and Unsolicited Press. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives, with her husband, in Maine.