Sing Alone & River of Death by Elaine MK Helou
Sing Alone
Al Malik on his takht,
even asleep he carries as-samaa’,
where al-qamar is al‘aqmaar,
and higher than ash-shams.
My ancestors know the garden can heal,
so forget your parents—
only oud of zaqqoum can return
al-jinaan to our hands.
But he does not speak easy.
Like any tyrant, he
knows that in order to
subjugate you need a
subject; he knows to keep
you alive, just. He knows
he can make you suffer
before he sings to you.
He knows he can make you
hurt, so long as he soothes
you with a voice of earth,
water, fire, and air — just
after prayer, before
he strikes again. Here
is what you need to do.
Use
your
absolute
strongest
arm. Embrace
him; hug him to
your body with a
gentle headlock, so
he cannot move. Put
your handshake around
his neck. His bound edges
burrow your skin, but this
is merely a price of being
allowed to tickle him with
a wrong-ended feather.
One hungry string at
a time, he laughs.
The sound the
shape of
a tear. Your hand stutters,
stings; and still he will not
sing, until you are hard,
brutal and unflinching
as rushing water down
his neck. This, he respects.
*
But forsake the king,
there are other courtiers in the firqa.
The lawgiver is much the same—
a rigid backbone to measure against—
death placed in your lap,
put there not by the hunter’s bow,
nor the scribe’s jangling cries,
nor the warrior’s rolling, trilling gait,
but by the slaves and the jesters,
who will suffocate you
in a lake of reeds
so that you learn to breathe—
who take you back
before the womb.
River of Death
Things have been stuck lately.
I forsake sleep to watch the east. The moon is there with the stars, having kept the sun’s friends in the divorce. And of course, the possums in the roof sounding five times their own heftiness, and of course the bats eating all the neighbour’s mangoes. The broken horizon at last bleeds ashy grey: dark, pale, fire colours, bruise colours, blue colours. The moon doesn’t so much stay in the sky as slink around, greeting the sun like a long dead friend, and the sun less than impressed. My alarm goes off shrieking at me, maybe upset they’ve become redundant, though I’m not in a way for their neediness today. Kookaburras laugh at me the same hour they always do, and I vaguely wonder why I bother with the phone. There’re crows all over the lawn eating yesterday’s scraps, the other neighbour’s cat stalking them from the front garden. The bin truck’s arrival shoos them away.
Where was the moment I could say: it is no longer night?
I go for a walk to get out of the house. Basically two years and I can count the number of times on my neglected calendar. The park is empty but for magpies and magpie larks and magpie-coloured currawongs and currawong-coloured butcher birds, and none of them can get the roundabout to spin. Or seem to figure out the slide. Mostly they peck at the sand. Casuarina trees line the pavement in drama — they are over this; one branch thrown over their faces and the other sweeping over the road. The scented acronychia, who are rather over the casuarinas, if they were to be honest, just stand there and supervise, allowing the miners to hop all over them, patient as a parent with an army of talkative toddlers. All perk up when the breeze visits, funnelled over the bitumen channel, excited rustling accentuated with a 4WD’s roar. The birds take the lift, and from my place half-way across the road, safe up on an island, I see one land in the sticky black river.
And go under.
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