{"id":5568,"date":"2016-11-03T11:01:39","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T11:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/?p=5568"},"modified":"2016-11-03T11:01:39","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T11:01:39","slug":"nominated-for-the-push-cart-prize-africa-north-a-poem-by-robin-ouzman-hislop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/nominated-for-the-push-cart-prize-africa-north-a-poem-by-robin-ouzman-hislop\/","title":{"rendered":"Nominated for the Push Cart Prize. Africa North. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop"},"content":{"rendered":"

  Africa North is an excerpt from the collected poems All the Babble of the Souk. Robin Ouzman Hislop<\/a> <\/strong>
\n 
\nSolstice winds, rain return in spells
\na moon waxes full, dogs howl as well.
\n 
\nAll the babble of the Souk
\nmen over there, over there women.
\n 
\nAll the life of the planet
\nso little part of it that i breathe.
\n 
\nWeather beaten highlands, once passed through.
\n 
\nThe river bed, no more like a parched bone
\nits late autumnal river meanders as a vein
\npast four reservoirs
\na quest that will end in winter\u00b4s flood.
\n 
\nBetween them are momentary mists
\nwhere brightly clad figures of the north, suddenly dim.
\n 
\nOn the frontier\u2019s beach taxis come, go
\nonly the stranded remain, together with the seagulls
\nfour men huddled, drenched in pouring rain
\ndead once more, again, all pathways home
\nwashed away, again. A broken song
\n 
\nRemember me, sung in a doorway
\nbrings the world at large together
\nas suddenly as it narrows.
\n 
\n~
\n 
\nWater runs on marble
\nnakedness revealed, nakedness concealed
\nform water words, water memories, mists, fates.
\n 
\nVeins wrestle the marble into mangled knots
\nblemished pearls on an implacable skin
\nshards leaving fragmentary traces
\nempty spaces awaiting faces.
\n 
\nLights dance in the night, picturesque
\n\u201ccasas blancas del pueblo\u201d
\nappear through the darkness
\n 
\nas the brush strokes of my mind steal the action of the shadow.
\n 
\nMists cordon the mountain tops
\nguerdoned crowns like wreathes.
\n 
\nAncient fields\u2019 still colours surrounded
\nby burgeoning new lead to the valley below.
\n 
\nOld women, old as aglow, so slow they go
\npoised aloof in an untouchable world, trapped.
\n 
\nHigh in kiln firelight they cowl night\u2019s shade
\nto oversee goats on the hill beneath.
\n 
\nDaughters of necessity naked in the rock
\nunleashed in white trefoil in the marsh
\nswamp of night rain, stark where epochs
\nsleep in their shadows.
\n 
\nReplication of memories, where the old
\nbecomes the new, a world splits in two
\nwith Morpheus in the breach.
\n 
\nBeyond control, beyond reach the erratic butterfly
\nflits bloom to bloom, the intrepid stalker with net
\nboth captured in the mimic mould.
\n 
\nA knot is tied, a knot that wrestles
\nembraces, that ravels birth
\nunravels death & binds its existence.
\n 
\n~
\n 
\nHer face is as if a moon glazed over
\nwith a less serene ceramic dust that in the end
\nafter its perplexity contains its surety.
\n 
\nShe draws her forefinger laterally across
\nunder her eye lid in a smear
\nnor can you change the image of what you are
\nin the pupil of her eye.
\n 
\nBabble bodies blur
\nvoices with their echoes down the street
\nsky high, prices fly
\n 
\na bird song breaks, a splash charade.
\n 
\nFaces in the rain thin
\nweakness of watery years.
\n 
\nA winnowing canvass tosses corn
\nas fireflies in the blazing day.
\n 
\nThe hag in her rags begs her bag
\nholding all shadows to account.
\n 
\nYou sit in the solitary corner
\nat the empty dice board
\nto throw, as the music swells, as strings play.
\n 
\nOn the washing line clothes of all shapes
\nsizes are waiting to be filled
\nsuspended between earth, sky, where white sheets blow.
\n 
\nA twinge of nostalgia flashes
\na link between a fluttering curtain
\nan open window frame, a sun shadow game
\na flickering apparition pattern leaving only – strands.
\n 
\nA breeze flutters an open foolscap on the table
\nas though a phantom reader
\nshould flick with regard through a score of notes
\nthen stops at the first blank white sheets
\nstays, the moving hand that wrote, wrote no more.
\n 
\n~
\n 
\nOn record, old honky-tonk goes on
\namidst the heaps of consumer city sneakers
\nin the same dust where faces
\nturn from their spring red lustre to a sun soiled wear
\n 
\nThrough a beehive of alleys
\nnames, aye to fetch them home again
\nas if where the countless dead resided, you\u2019d said
\nin a market of women shrouded in shawls.
\n 
\n~
\n 
\nBerlin falls, Baghdad falls
\nall the years turn to further tears
\nfurther fears to merge with your voyage
\nthe shape of dreams to come
\nto be only endearments of what has gone before.
\n 
\nA flower opens after a thousand years in a shell of tears
\nindifferent to its beholders\u2019 sight
\nwho paint it with the colours from the waters of their night
\non an unknown shore, to whose sight it opened once before.
\n 
\nChildren\u2019s faces like radiant imps
\nplay carefree in the streets below
\noverhead on red tiles, fat pigeons bicker, coo.
\n 
\nIn an internet cafe, an Arab girl discrete in headdress
\nplays with cartoon molecules of Mickey Mouse
\nKoala bear
\n 
\nnubile women\u2019s faces dream of nudity in their shrouds.
\n 
\nWonky pinz nez specs, jumble sale clothes
\nbad teeth, unshaven grin
\nlooking a faded duplicate of a down
\nout James Joyce with the come on
\nare you Irish, he asks
\nperhaps he was once upon a time.
\n 
\n~
\n 
\nThey came through the cleft of the mountain
\n– where the river ran
\nto swim as a blur in the naked purple of the eye.
\n 
\nOn the mountain face there is a scar
\nonce a sacred place, now extinct, as they are.
\n 
\nYet wild still she runs, amidst the sheep, goats
\ntoils at the hearth, dutifully bears children
\nyesterday she knows but not tomorrow
\nwhere she hides her sorrow.
\n 
\nEven as he ploughs the hillside
\na photo will steal his soul, but his beasts will do.
\n 
\n~
\n 
\nTwilight\u2019s girls, girls, girls
\nthrong the bustling street corners eating caracoles.
\n 
\nBy day the olive tree green in the blue sky of the window
\nseems almost immortal enriched with the blood
\nit\u2019s enriched, now at its roots.
\n 
\nCosta de la playa, white beehives in the sun, all money, no honey.
\n 
\nIn the broken lights of the bazaar
\nthe dusky eyes of the beggar sunk in their sockets
\nmaze in crooked cul de sacs embargo amidst
\nthe furls of silk that foil the flickering lantern niche.
\n 
\nIn the gloaming a solitary reaper reaps its shadow.
\n 
\nStreets packs ravage carcasses
\nat dawn, the city wakes to the city\u2019s obedience
\nto obey its disappearing shadows.
\n 
\nA ghost city of watchers
\nwatched as shadows by a memory that has outlived them
\nnow fragments in an admixture of old, new
\namidst a junk yard of rubble
\n 
\nwatcher shadows phased captive to their fading stories.
\n 
\nThe street\u2019s mechanics of the day
\nobey their limits, patterns of parts
\nwhere we end only to start in a series of nows.
\n\t 
\nPost mortem of the world at large
\nan autopsy of ghosts on the slab.
\n 
\nBorn to see, in the boutiques people seem
\nlike their own mannequins
\nexistence is a mystery with no purpose <\/p>\n