The Sound Of A Forgotten Letter Poem by Seif-Eldeine O

The Sound of a Forgotten Letter

I look at a photograph of the city I was born in--
its crowded roadways, its grey buildings, the white dome
and marble floor of the Umayyad Mosque, the pointed
minarets where you can hear the call to prayer
that rises from them like 99 shots from twin Glocks,
and I imagine what was. The houses look tortured
straight into stone by a soldier with a rock knife.
Under the arch of Souk Hamidiyah, men walk side by side
with me. I smell their sweat over the merchants' cologne.
If I look closely at the photo, I will miss the black vests
of the Mukhabarat as they detain a University student
from protesting the emergency law. Instead, I'll see a young man
who travels from the mountain down the steep avenue
and into the city, standing on his bicycle's handlebars.
I won't see the Free Syrian Army soldier, shot by an eighteen-
year-old
studying to be an architect because he wants to design
the buildings that will replace the rubble. Maybe I'll see
another boy, thinking about a girl, reading Nizar Qabbani
until jasmine springs from his hand, and blossoms over the
flowers
on the girl's balcony, her taytay planted before the desert
knew the sound of death. I hold the photograph up to my eyes
and instead of an ISIS soldier hearing the casing of his bullet
as it hits the blood-soaked streets of Damashq, I‘m a man
who plays the oud with my wrist so close to the fretboard
I can hear it whisper. The thick palms of the derbake players'
hands
turn red from the cowhide. The belly dancer's abs quiver.
She rolls her vertebrae, leaning back her head until the band in
her hair
falls loose. But mostly I feel like the child who sleeps on the
carpets
of the Mosque. Its Arabesque contains all the shapes of the
world
that cannot fit a photograph. The child tries to determine if he
can eat
a square, or a triangle, or a hexagon until the janitor comes
to teach him more surahs from the Quran; the Sheikh,
busy writing his qiblay, which says 'Islam is a religion of peace,
no matter what the terrorists do.' And the janitor sits down
with the child, and pushes the air around the letter qawf.
He teaches me this letter's the letter the Syrians knew in a time
before the war, that it comes from deep in the throat,
and you need to drop your chin and let your whole mouth say it.
The most beautiful letter, as it's the hardest to say, while the
letter
we replaced it with comes easier but at a much greater cost.


This poem was originally published in Star 82 Review Issue 2.3