Infinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies
BY TARFIA FAIZULLAH
For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya
Image of teak tree seeds. The teak tree is native to much of Myanmar, where the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, lived for hundreds of years before extreme violence and persecution by the Myanmar government caused over a million Rohingya to flee.
Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady;
she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree.
Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still,
but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees.
My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or,
“a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree.
I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I
forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree;
night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling
succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed.
How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling
of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree).
I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf.
Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree!
Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems —
well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees.
(Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.)
Lately, all I think about are trees.
Read this again to replace tree with refugee.
Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.
TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, REGISTERS OF ILLUMINATED VILLAGES (Graywolf, 2018) and SEAM (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere.
The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Tarfia presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, NYU, Barnard, UC Berkeley, the Poetry Foundation, the Clinton School of Public Service, Brac University, and elsewhere.