Five Poems
Aubade Before Birth
my body’s all she knows
of the world, her turning all
I know of her body
Aristophanes’ lovers,
all roundness and limbs,
we’re a meld of selves
the gods will split skin to skin
heartbeats joined, one animal,
soon two horses running
two, two, split to two—
* * *
while I am still your Newet
your night some star-clad
goddess arching
above and around you
my voice your thunder
my blood your cloak
as you,
small sun god,
tunnel to light
quicken and twist
in this pitch
once more
that light will blind
and part us
--
Aubade under the I-10
New Orleans, 2006
Tomorrow we’ll pick our wheels, our home:
a Bug, a Benz – more space to stretch—
a van if nothing’s already living in it.
For the hour we’ve got, let’s lie down
in this Cadillac, a half empty whiskey
bottle, a bottle of Busiprone, some prayer
beads, a candle, what more do you want
on this lowdown, flea-bitten night,
shattered glass in the moonlight like stars?
Ducks nest in the rubble of the floodwall,
sunflowers root in the muck. Soon
daytime and cops will come creeping,
sirens circle and howl. Let’s moan
to the yelp of the levee dogs,
windows yawning as cars fly above.
--
Aubade in Alexandria
Above the Sufi’s grave
the call to prayer rouses villages
then spills through the city
Clear water, white linen
against a hot throat
Heads bend to ground,
to kitchen tiles, to train tracks
Our bodies, blue in first light,
have finished their petitions
Your people shall be my people, your God my God
Eight floors below, the water seller clangs
his pot with an ancient coin
found in a drainpipe
Go, love,
though my palms are hennaed like a bride,
go before the doorman wakes
Go and face your broken pillar,
explain your exile
in my country, in my arms
The door clicks,
a jaw snaps shut
shadows flee the stairwell
Vendors and muezzins
sing and weep
Day arrives: a flock of white birds
--
Aubade in Beirut, 2006
Soon sun will struggle
under a shroud of smoke,
a steamer dock to take him;
he can claim another country.
She’ll leave along the coast,
take her chances on the road
to Damascus, tie a white scarf
to her window like a flag and pray—
They will try to speak of later, after
as they stand on the dock,
but now they walk out to take
one more look at the stars.
With all the lights out,
they fill the sky.
--
Aubade in Cairo
we share the last smoke
of our Cleopatra pack
retape our bandages
curfew’s still not lifted
but the rooftop cock
has insisted
all night
it is morning
~
Andy Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has spent most of her adult life in New Orleans working at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With her partner, Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from the Arabic and founded Meena, a bilingual literary journal, in 2005. For the last two years she has lived in Egypt, where she worked at the American University in Cairo and documented the revolution in essays, poems and photographs. A graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, her writing has been published in three chapbooks, publications in Lebanon, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico and throughout the United States in places such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Guernica, and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century. Her work also been featured in Pasion Flamenca’s play “Flamenclorico: Lore of the Miners,” performed at the Joyce Theater, Public Radio International’s “The World,” the jewelry designs of Jeanine Payer, in Santa Fe’s public buses, and in SUNY’s Drawn from Disaster exhibit and Paul Chan’s Tree of Life project for the New Museum.