Breath
I.
the element of tomorrow
has fallen away
with the city’s midnight traffic
my veins course with the streets
and nothing sleeps
but simply lays within itself
unaware of how close
the need to collapse feels
there are no dreams here
only the nakedness of breath
there can be nothing said
with warm chemicals
and faint sirens everywhere
II.
in shape-shifting form
rock doves lift and settle
like shadows blessed with light
steam rises from manholes
with the breaths of ghosts
windows glow and collude
with a sense of people
in the concrete sea
and everywhere the harped angle of wings
form something almost religious
ascending from the streets
or fluttering off balconies
III.
nothing else
to say when the long nights
stream with the sound
of traffic drowning
beneath the apartment window
our breaths flailing out as far
as the steel tracks reaching out of the city
rail lines shining beneath stars –
the pale moon suffering
in the cold breeze
IV.
to differ with the world around you
is as common as breathing with fear
each dream comes with the same face
the same places morphed off a melted mirror
what is air to us when we sleep –
but simply a resistance from never waking
and when we wake our breaths
hover over us with the fragile substance
of all we’ve done – everything remembered
wished and longed for – and sometimes
the air we exhale lifts off our lips –
peacefully forgotten
V.
what takes to air
is breath in code
thought on wings
freed to open ears
the mind’s garden
flush and sharp with light
singing off the flight
of internal tongues
what is said is the gentle
work of turning
air to flight –
finding the guiding light
of breath dying
in open hearts
Serge & Eleanor
La misère se dissimule parfois dans un décor de carte postale. En arrière-plan, la tour Eiffel prend les premiers rayons du soleil. Dans les jardins du Trocadéro, une poignée de joggeurs commencent leur journée en petites foulées. Sur l’esplanade, une femme en robe longue blanche à sequins prend la pose devant son téléphone portable installé sur trépied, cheveux blonds permanentés, lèvres soulignées au rouge carmin.
Le Monde 2021
I held my three fingers to the winds
to the winds of the North, to the winds of the Levant,
to the winds of the South, to the winds of the setting sun;
and I raised my three fingers towards the Moon,
towards the full Moon, the Moon full and naked…
Afterwards I plunged my three fingers in the sand
in the sand that had grown cold.
Then Mother said, ‘Go into the world, go!
Viaticum, Birago Diop
i. 1994
Neither could have known what the place
meant to the other. Neither could have guessed.
The sun still the same sun rising and falling
over Trocadero. September’s air warm on
the terrace packed with language.
Serge sits on the steps – never really resting –
watching young Parisians sail off makeshift
wooden ramps on worn out roller skates –
each skater’s jump choreographed through
a tunnel of screams. It’s Saturday – the busiest
day of the week. Police vans parked on streets.
Tourists of all ages milling about in herds –
trying to capture time in a city that art or literature
or the promise of romance brought them to.
Heads bowed. Thumbs resetting reflex cameras.
Viewfinders squared up to the eye. Leaf shutters
collapsing behind glass – allowing light to fall back
into to a mechanical retina – staining reels
of celluloid with a loved one’s practiced smile.
*
With La Dame de Fer’s latticed frame towering
in the background – Serge continuously rises
to his feet when tourists approach. Then
sits again when they leave – never having time
to ease his back on the steps he occupies
because at any moment a whistle or shout
will have him packing up and running.
He watches the skaters ride the air and knows
everything will subside after the tower’s shadow
dials northwest over the Seine and the river
darkens to the sweet color of Alsatian wine.
And for some reason this is when the fools
come out with their cameras in the grainy light.
And there’s always that someone in a group
who jostles eagerly for the spot where
Hitler once stood flanked by Albert Speer
and Arno Breker. And standing on that spot –
some clasp their hands below their belts
and stare over the terrace – their eyes fixed
on the right wing of Chaillot. And staring aloft –
some adjust their pose and take on the despot’s
cold intensity all too easily. And some stand
proud wearing the intimate seconds all too well.
ii. Palaces & Poets
*
March 24, 1952
Eleanor attends a garden party thrown by the Nizam of Hyderabad.
A black vortex of kites circling above the courtyards of Chowmahalla.
They walk through the grounds admiring zinnias. Hibiscus. Dahlias.
The preened lawn soft underfoot. They enter the palace and meet
the Nizam’s daughter. Then sit for a brief moment and speak alone.
She doesn’t ask too much about the architecture of the palace –
but is more interested in the country’s history. Politics. Arts.
For a while the prince considers her words. The sky pinpricked
with nascent stars. Cool water cleansing each word with each sip.
Beyond the palace walls – the confluence of the ancient and new.
Vehicles. Oxen. Buildings. Trees. When the Nizam eventually speaks.
His facial features soften and his irises dilate as wide as the sky.
*
“The statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, who advocated the position that human rights need to be respected, was erected at the avenue leading to the National Museum of Contemporary History in Tivoli Park.”
2018, Ljubljana
In the summer her bronze skin is hot and only cools when
the sky darkens and the river that holds the city’s name
flows quietly beneath the watch of dragons on the bridge.
Silhouettes. Lamplight. Sculptures and paintings asleep in
museums. There is wine to be had while listening to poetry.
There exists a freedom while dancing to Slavic music –
a claim holding no borders – a claim firmly gripping
desire with a hold loosening out to let the night slip away.
The next morning we packed our bags and the coach drove
east of out of Ljubljana. Twelve strangers from four continents.
The black Julian Alps jutting up into the blue Balkan sky.
Fistfuls of chasselas and rizvanec heavy on thin palisades.
Forests passed by with a deep hypnotic light flowing off
leaf and shadow. My reflection staring back from the glass
as warm winds washed over beech and hornbeam and spruce.
And from nowhere a feeling of sleep consumed me whole.
When we reached the hotel – the midday sun squatted high
above the ancient city – baking Ptuj’s cobbled streets. Old
narrow corridors held within stone Styrian walls. The Drava
flowing through a valley undisturbed by morphing borders.
With the windows open in my room and the air conditioner
switched off. I listened to songs of leaf chatter. The cobbled
streets empty where church bells rang silent in dreams.
And I found myself walking through the streets to the bridge
where the breeze lifted with a cool breath off the river’s flow.
Ptuj’s lights gleaming off the Drava like every language
I have ever heard and only understood in dreams. Like
every language Serge had heard and had to learn to speak.
iii. sans-papier
“The state system seems to tolerate the sans-papiers as long they are humanoid silhouettes, not real people with real names, real addresses, real families, and personal histories. Always at the mercy of the state’s shifting migration politics and the focus of many worried gazes, they are the spectral protagonists of a global narrative, one in which Europe, Africa, and Asia converge at the foot of a wrought-iron tower.”
-International Press Service, 2018
It’s a dry occupation. The cash comes in with
nothing real to show. People simply come and go.
The monument speaks for itself and he knows
the miniatures of the Eiffel Tower are not made
in France but come from China. And even
though he watches more fuckers pose as Hitler –
he still smiles and hands back their change
in whatever currency they demand. And
he thanks them in one of the many languages
that occupy the barren landscape of his dreams.
It’s been almost thirty years since he came here.
And this is it for him. And this is how it will be.
Everything now is what it is but coated with a
thin vibrant touch that gives the sheen to gilded
statues of gods and women and men on pedestals –
the grand splayed wings of Palais de Chaillot
spreading out from the tired arch of his scapulars.
From where he has been stationed he watches
the last summer pilgrims packing up blankets
and bottles of wine and beer from picnics – the cool
spray off Fountaine de Varsovie whispering
over the ‘esplanade de droits de l’homme’.
The bathers almost gone. The fountain’s pool
settling to a gentle hymn beneath the evening sky.
As Serge stands up from the terrace something
shifts uneasily in his being. He knows the city well.
Knows its people. Knows the law and knows how
to be invisible beneath the law’s gaze. When
he first arrived in Paris an old man gripped his
arm and firmly said – Si tu es vu. Tu es trouvé.
Si tu es trouvé. Tu perds tout. But now something
was missing. The very thing that had drawn him
to the city had now eluded him for years. Every
promise he had come to chase through the streets
had now become as foreign as the smell
of the tilled earth from where he was born.
And after he packs up and slings the bag of
miniature towers over his shoulder and walks
beneath the tower itself – down along a curve
on the bank of the Seine – perhaps it’s the way
the breeze turns upon his face that makes
him look down and notice the astral blue light
sailing gently on the river’s surface – the azure
wake quietly skipping beneath a concourse
of expensive buildings and the cold snaking
waterway – the moon – a slow missile above
the city. And he slows and sits on a bench
and is consumed by the movement of moonlight
and water. Just as he’d done many years before
with many others staring at a moonlit sea.
iv. Silhouettes
‘Further off is the measured force the word of the sea
Further without leeway for the blueing shoulders of the horizon’
-Edouard Maunick, Les Manèges de la mer
The smell of the shore is strong
less than a mile away
and he knows nothing of the ocean’s chorus
slipping back off sand and washing back into the froth of itself.
The creak of wood. Salt heavy off the dawn air.
Silhouettes of swallows gather in frenzied arrowed lines
above the island – a land holding a future
where thousands
seek the future’s path.
Only to land on the beach. And walk blind.
v. Legacies
“PARIS, Wednesday December 9, 1948 —Before we left our meeting room at 6:45 last night, our chairman in Committee No. 3 told us that when we returned for the evening session to come prepared to stay until the work on the Declaration of Human Rights was finished. Our job was to arrange the articles in their proper sequence. We were warned the task would run far into the morning.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
It was just after 3 am when the declaration was passed. Seizième
gleaming softly with sleep as chauffeurs woke and straightened into
character. The cold leather of limousine seats stitched with the finest
thread. The perfume of polished hide. Was it something in the blood
or conscience that brought Eleanor to ask Humphrey to write the initial
draft. Malik and Chang hashing out a promised legacy for humankind.
The rights of what all should be born into. And feel. And become.
Is this what came from Hyde Park and the intimate rooms of Val-Kill –
where conversations were scored with politics and art and philosophy.
Where thoughts were underscored with various symphonies of war.
The charter almost began with: ‘All men are born free and equal…’
But Hansa Mehta revised Jefferson’s phrase with her insistence on
‘All human beings are born free and equal…’ casting a wider claim
in a world where children were born into labour knowing nothing but whips
singing off bare skin – nothing more than what their parents knew
and those who had come centuries before when nameless shadows
ate in the dark. All fucking and sleeping in the darkness they all shared.
And like the Magna Carta – the charter came out of feudal disputes
over lands and inhabitants and the goodwill of some who entered
grand conference halls and spoke in long corridors in the palace on
the hill – embroidered flags intertwined with treaties colouring the walls.
And when votes were cast to pass the resolution – the takeaways
were for the triumph and legacy and a better future for all. And in
someways – the hope for a total inherent gift for active empathy.
vi. Borders
Eleanor has a recurring dream: Ink slowly dries off the nib of a stylus
while thin tails of grey oily smoke rise from a snuffed paraffin lamp.
The smoke from the lamp perfuming the dark. An elderly man walks
out of the darkened room. His slumped silhouette filling the door’s jamb.
Tobacco pipe clutched in one hand. In the dream she knows the city
the old man lives in is a heavily populated merchant port. The cobbled
streets beneath his window polished quiet with a thin gleam of ice.
He undresses. Puts on his bedclothes. Drinks a measure of some tonic.
And immediately after he slides between the warmed sheets he falls
asleep then wakes the next morning refreshed. The morning air grey
with the sun cushioned somewhere beneath thin blankets of cloud.
And in this dream the man lays in bed for a while listening to church
bells as his mind strays through alternating ordinances and coordinates.
And he lies half awake and half asleep with a sense of relief knowing
no mountains or rivers ruled the T-square he simply used to draw
a straight line before expunging the oil lamp and walking out the room –
having vigorously begun to configure borders many months before.
*
Along Boulevard Haussmann Serge picks up a lamb shawarma. Eats
and walks back to his room in Barbès. Kicks off his shoes and falls
back hard onto his bed. The street beneath the window alive and loud.
A thin foam mattress cradles his wired frame with a dirty reluctance.
He falls asleep. And for the first time in a long while his muscles ease
and allow his mind to freely navigate territories of dreams into which
he wished to enter. In one dream he stands in a large studio in a place
he knows but has never been to. The essence of salt tainting distant
whispers he has learnt to forget like songs he had learnt from distant winds
off the sea. And in the dream he stands with a girl his age. Her fingers
clasped over his naked chest. Both staring out upon a wide open beach.
Her warm breasts against his back. Both knowing this is love. Both
knowing that at anytime they could simply turn from the view and open
the door and walk then dive into the sea. Free. Naked as they were born.
Togara Muzanenhamo is a Zimbabwean poet born in Lusaka, Zambia. His first collection of poems ‘Spirit Brides’ was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Muzanenhamo’s second collection ‘Gumiguru’ was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. His third collection ‘Textures’ won the National Arts and Merit Award for Literature. Muzanenhamo’s fourth collection ‘Virga’ won the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was an Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year, and a Poetry Society Autumn Recommendation.