Vol 2 No 1 2008
Margo Berdeshevsky
What Has Not Fallen
The Indonesian sea, the sea the sea
how it floats its seventeen thousand islets
in the shadows of the drowned,
my doppelganger already counting
leaves on wasp wings and their
other ghosts, their thousands,
and the moon expanding dawn like
helium to match the watered vast I'll quickly
kneel to, kissing what god ? I do not know.
Not my language, flood, or palace, or Allah,
the violence of – mourning, mourning, that
kind of mourning. Every grain of its loosened mountain
memory recoiling like its infamous curl exposing
desert that is the bottom of its blighted sea,
when they speak the names of their beloved dead,
what language can draw a ghost in white ink,
its charred desire . Ask me. Ask me what is
an "I" at the unraveling of a world, was this
the end at the end of our time? Those who never had
enough except of luminescence and the mildew
of the tropic quotidian,
too
much broken,
too
much dead,
that flower had too much purple, too much gold,
too much red, and three petals, once.
Did you have time to kiss, any of you?
In every language, any, my only useful prayer.
"The sea has not fallen. The sea has not fallen.
(off stage whisper) The sea has not fallen." •
Sumatra,
2004
[• from a line by Andrew Zawacki .]
©Margo Berdeshevsky
Poems by
Margo Berdeshevsky