Aleah Sulayman Bantas

In Retracing A Memory

there is a photograph of a girl in a white dress
inside an album, kept only by a plastic rack

I grew up remembering how to pick kapok,
separate the seeds, each one,
fruit in search of an embrace
in the verses of Mahmoud Darwish,
on a river dying of thirst.

After class of halaqah, reading the Qur’an,
a white face, eyes narrowed into a slit.
Into the echo of a daughter singing.

In such happenstance,
I do not mind being named after a flower,
for it holds a thought of tenderness,
the aftertaste of nectar on the tongue.
Not of conquests,
of peace agreements
typewritten in birth certificates,
taking shelter under an awning of coconut fronds.

Listen, I’m trying not to be a poet,
to the screech of a gunmetal,
a poet is nothing but a prey.

Bilu

 Cerulean in my native language
is only blue and no other names.
Bilu for the sky, for dye, for the sea.
For how we hold color,
and how it sits in my tongue—
the foreign names we want them to carry.
but all blues are made of one loveliness.
Before the rustle of ipil-ipil trees at dawn,
in glass washed pale by rain
and waves crashing.
In corals under shallow light,
I borrow colors
and watch them fall back
into one word. I have only bilu.