Fariha’s Reviews > A River Dies of Thirst: Journals > Status Update

I watch as your absence accumulates over my head like a heavy sky. Even if you were not the absence you are, I would be the presence I am. As if you are with me. As if I am in the utmost need of the least thing.

No, I'm not a poet waiting to get his poem from the signals you give out. You and I - if we may be united in a single phrase, just as we are together here in one room - are light and airy guests on archetypal clouds, longing to fly to the trees of night, with no thought of a tomorrow that fails to prepare us to live without hope.

Your presence is translucent, and I do not know if your soul inhabited your body, or your body was clothed in your soul and shone like a pearl in my darkness. Form and substance are confused in my mind, and I see form as substance, and substance as the perfect form. I compete with you to be silent, so that I don't say something which plunges me back into the sort of clumsy improvisation I used before you.

I say what I say to you in language that needs the density of honey and the lightness of a butterfly, in the presence of this power that is capable of raising mere chance to the level of something unique and wonderful. For where does your silence take us, as it bestows upon obscure language the seductiveness of word-play? As if l have not written before, and learnt by heart what I wrote to you.

Even if you were not the dazzling presence you are, I would be the absence in you that I am - inside and out. Your presence is translucent, crystalline, I see gardens beyond it and am swept away to high wildernesses, inaccessible even to an imagination that is delighted by the range of metaphor and hindered by the poverty of everyday language.

We believe sometimes, and sometimes have no faith
but it is indifferent to us
When it hunts us down one by one
then slays us with a cool hand

It is a killer, and innocent.

It is animal/angel
with the power of a thousand horses, and the lightness of a ghost
equivocal, petulant, peaceable
Whenever it flees, it returns
It treats us well, and badly
it takes us by surprise when we forget our emotions
and arrives without warning
It's an anarchist/an egoist/
master/one and only/multiple

The woman I will see tomorrow in the same setting, I also know. She is my daughter whom I left in the middle of the poems so that she could learn to walk, then fly, beyond this setting, and perhaps earn the admiration of the viewers and disappoint the snipers. For a clever friend said to me: 'It's time for us to move on, if we can, from a subject that makes people pity us to one that makes them envy us.'

The woman I'm seeing now in the same image on a colour TV screen, I have known well for forty years. She is my sister, following in the footsteps of our mother journeying in the wilderness: fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge.

That hurrying woman, crowned with a wool blanket and a pitcher of water, dragging a boy in her right hand and his sister in her left, followed by a herd of frightened goats, that woman fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge - I have known her for sixty years. She is my mother who left me behind at a crossroads with a basket of dry bread, a candle, and a box of matches ruined by the damp.