History Speaks in Its Dry Voice
Andrew J. Calis
I am American. I cannot speak
in Arabic because my father said
I would have an accent. He keeps
a part of his past on his tongue. The dead
to him still live and so
I cannot know him like I wish I could.
My dad has choked, swallowing
suffering; he has warmed it in his blood.
Pick any thirty years. See the pain
that faintly colors them. Flat landscapes where
once buildings stood, should stand, stood when planes
as loud as thunder flattened houses. There,
my uncle lived, a middle-eastern man
whose house
was taken from him, out of need, and standing
in the streets, his family without
anything, he thought, I have to earn
it back, somehow. He didn’t. My dad
escaped and says he will never return.
Jerusalem that stones its prophets, had
its chance and cast it away like dice.
It glows eternal, dead land, history —
how much you look like any other place
when I think of what I cannot see,
your people who do not look alike
but do to me, who’s never seen their eyes
at home, who sees them in unnatural light:
wide-painted with thick brushes, generalized
Arabs, poor, abused
and Dad says,
yes we were poor but
there are no
words for what we lost. and we were raised
to be strong. we are strong.
But my father’s past he keeps
inside his chest. It sits there like dust,
dead skin that slips away; or it seeps
like sores and then I get a hushed
glimpse of some richness before it fades
to the colors of the desert, yellow glow
that anyone can paint: a yellow grayed
as pages of a book kept closed.
in Arabic because my father said
I would have an accent. He keeps
a part of his past on his tongue. The dead
to him still live and so
I cannot know him like I wish I could.
My dad has choked, swallowing
suffering; he has warmed it in his blood.
Pick any thirty years. See the pain
that faintly colors them. Flat landscapes where
once buildings stood, should stand, stood when planes
as loud as thunder flattened houses. There,
my uncle lived, a middle-eastern man
whose house
was taken from him, out of need, and standing
in the streets, his family without
anything, he thought, I have to earn
it back, somehow. He didn’t. My dad
escaped and says he will never return.
Jerusalem that stones its prophets, had
its chance and cast it away like dice.
It glows eternal, dead land, history —
how much you look like any other place
when I think of what I cannot see,
your people who do not look alike
but do to me, who’s never seen their eyes
at home, who sees them in unnatural light:
wide-painted with thick brushes, generalized
Arabs, poor, abused
and Dad says,
yes we were poor but
there are no
words for what we lost. and we were raised
to be strong. we are strong.
But my father’s past he keeps
inside his chest. It sits there like dust,
dead skin that slips away; or it seeps
like sores and then I get a hushed
glimpse of some richness before it fades
to the colors of the desert, yellow glow
that anyone can paint: a yellow grayed
as pages of a book kept closed.
Andrew J. Calis is an Arab-American poet, teacher, and husband, and an overjoyed father of four. His first book of poetry, Pilgrimages (Wipf & Stock, 2020), was praised by James Matthew Wilson for having ‘the intensity of Hopkins’ and for ‘layer[ing] light on light in hopes of helping us to see.’ His work has appeared in America, Dappled Things, Presence, Convivium and elsewhere, and he teaches at Archbishop Spalding High School in Maryland.
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