Mall of the Emirates by John Mateer

We don't use the word "exile" anymore,
despite meeting in the Mall of the Emirates,
that hyperbolic cave, ordering what is expensive
peasant food, while contemplating our prospects
on two or, maybe, three continents,
confessing that we no longer return to our natal countries.
We're unlike our taxi drivers, with our perpetually
renewable visas and self-conscious amnesia,
even if we, too, could forever cruise down Dubai's freeways,
reminiscing on the stupas of Anuradapurna,
how in the sunlight they glint like rice bowls overturned.
In consolation we have what used to be Literature,
its metamorphosis, those phantoms, our other lives.
Or isn't it the other way round? Haven't we been expelled
from the Garden of Nothingness to wander, decade-long,
lost in thought, imagining Al Muteena Street as an avenue in Tunis,
grey palm trees attempting shadow against gilded exhaust haze?
Ali, remember that dream you told me of: Hafiz
appearing to an Australian scholar, nominating him
his Interpreter? That's probably how we ended up here
in this extravaganza of shops, this oasis,
as a poem born on the tip of another's tongue,
as perfectly translatable synonyms for that word: "exile."

"Words"by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other –
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Our love is here to stay By Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Clouds gather under a blue moon,

like trouble brewing as strange fruit

continues to swing – keeping time –

while Columbia turntables refuse to spin

the song; is vinyl too black, too flash to be

sleeved in white prisons? The answer lies

like white gardenia petals on a bruise

too subtle to separate from wind; like

a trumpet caught in the ill wind of a jet’s

prejudice in the company of clouds – a

rumble in a jungle of noise, the forgotten b-

side that holds its breath. Trouble brewing.

There’s nothing random about rain;

It clears the sky’s throat for the sun’s shrill

voice; the white hanky is for black sweat.

They’ll all laugh when I say it, whisper

as though I’m making whoopee with Communist

ideals. They’ll laugh like they laughed

when Louis appeared coal-sketched on screen,

years before he lifted the smoke and called

Eisenhower a spade, said let’s call the whole

Soviet thing off, as sweetly as he sang that song

with Ella –– and there’s silence where the applause

should be; because it’s OK when the needle hits

the dark flesh of wax and causes blue screams,

but when the tip hits the dark flesh of a woman

and she wails for justice; shooting off ideas

as she reloads stimulants, suddenly music is

treble trouble. And everybody knows

that the calm comes before the clouds . . .

There’s nothing random about rain; so blow

Louis, blow from cheek to cheek, blow

under a blanket of blue until you get a kick

from a laughing Ella and switch the tone

so swift   //              so hot      //              so dark

that the only bright thing will be the spotlight

of struggle illuminating a girl in Baltimore,

learning as time goes by that life isn’t a fine

romance, love, but your soul won’t desert you;

like the note can’t leave the music, like

the shadows can’t leave the darkness.

The secret is to listen; to the slow creeping

embrace of the trumpet’s protest, the percussive

defiance of the piano’s syncopation, the indrawn

breaths when the song learns the body that sings it.

My Childhood Home I See Again by Abraham Lincoln

My childhood home I see again, 
    And sadden with the view; 
And still, as memory crowds my brain, 
    There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world 
    'Twixt earth and paradise, 
Where things decayed and loved ones lost 
    In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that's earthly vile, 
    Seem hallowed, pure, and bright, 
Like scenes in some enchanted isle 
    All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye 
    When twilight chases day; 
As bugle-notes that, passing by, 
    In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall, 
    We, lingering, list its roar— 
So memory will hallow all 
    We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away 
    Since here I bid farewell 
To woods and fields, and scenes of play, 
    And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain 
    Of old familiar things; 
But seeing them, to mind again 
    The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day, 
    How changed, as time has sped! 
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray, 
    And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell 
    How nought from death could save, 
Till every sound appears a knell, 
    And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread, 
    And pace the hollow rooms, 
And feel (companion of the dead) 
    I'm living in the tombs.

The Road Not Taken BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

SONNET 43 by William Shakespeare.

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, 
For all the day they view things unrespected; 
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, 
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed;
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Tears, Idle Tears by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more.