Ben Heller Week 3- Mona Arshi's "Gazal"

 This week’s Mona Arshi poem was a bit of a query. I couldn’t quite capture what it is Arshi intended to convey through her words, but I’ve come to an interpretation of my own. I wholeheartedly believe that this poem is a commentary on life after death. Arshi explores and grapples with the idea of reincarnation- of transformation into another being, another sensation. She yearns to be one with nature, to commune with it. She demands importance and exuberance and respect in the afterlife. When she “want[s] to sequester words” and “string them up to ripen on vines” she requires that there be a permanence to ephemeral beauty. Her feelings are perfectly understandable. We so much fear death that we fretfully ponder the uncertainty of the final sleep. Sleep? We command to be remembered in the next life, so that we may quell those fears of 6 feet under. This is juxtaposed with the idleness of such beauteous things as “rose or tulip” under a “desiring night sky”. Such vivid imagery serves to highlight the reluctance in letting go and giving in. That sweet smell, that final embrace that they call the end is something to resignedly accept, for better or for worse. Rather, it is something to which we can look forward. Life trudges and breaks, destroys and tears down. There is a certain elegance with which one can imagine a life after death, to “commune with rain and for the rain to be Merciful” to wake and see a thousand sunrises for all eternity. The author contemplates this all with a certain aversion. One does not wish for such things, surely?  In her reflections, it dons upon her that all is connected. There is no whole without those many parts. Because when God’s finger breaks, she reveals that her wrist has become wan. Thus she is content.

Ghazal

Not even our eyes are our own...

- Frederico Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba

I want to tune in to the surface, beside the mayfly

listen to how she holds her decorum on the skin of the pond.

I want to sequester words, hold them in stress positions,

foreignate them ,string them up to ripen on vines.

and I want to commune with rain and for the rain to be

merciful, a million tiny pressures on my flesh.

I refuse to return as either rose or tulip but wish

to be planted under the desiring night sky.

I want to be concentrated to a line under the pleat of your palm

and for it to radiate opalesque under shadow.

I want God's fingers to break and for you to watch as I

fold over my sleeve, reveal the detail of my paling wrist.