MIGRATION GHAZAL
My ship is two hands held together to cross the water.
What hope you carry, don’t spill a drop across the water.
If one spills out, we push his name like a prayer
into the palms of the dark, the body lost on the water.
Prayers we make into boats with the bowls of our hands
on the bones of our chests, to push one across the water.
Hands unlearn their work, relearn to feed us.
Each day a crossing, now toss on the water.
Like half-finished sentences, we move on unheard.
Practice the words of that country across the water.
The ferryman of souls is crossing to the country past sleep.
All immigrants eventually reach his ship and ripple the last water.
What comes biting on a dark night like memories?
Hook one and pull the silverfish from the glossed water.
Migrants wash in the river, the words for things
flake off, float like skins on top of the water.
In two hands I take you on the river of forgetting
Who am I, you ask in this country across the water.
Now we are no one. Mother, Father, Brother, Daughter,
all our names washed off on the water.
—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
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Matt Dhillon: “Immigration is a profound threshold to cross. I’ve been thinking a lot about crossings and how change comes to us with both growth and loss.”
