Tasting death is for everyone,

here, there. We will die here,

not on ground that doesn’t know us,

not floating face down in foreign waters,

not penned in a camp.

 

Here, in sight of neighbors

who know our names,

our barrel-bombed

apartment building’s collapse

killing them too.

 

Here is her laundry rope

tangled in his feet.

I know the shape

of that particular teapot

as I die on my street.

 

***

A professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arkansas since 1995, Mohja Kahf is the author of E-mails from Scheherazad (poetry), The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (novel), and Hagar Poems. She is working on a manuscript of love poems, and a manuscript of new poems about Syria.