Ancestry
Red tail lights
of a resurrected bike
chased by howls,
along the cemetery
road. How we turn
into family myths,
into warnings,
I think of my great
grandfather, dead
before I was born,
how one day in
his forties, he could
no longer read
the alphabet of the
Koran, how he lay
on his charpoy for
days, and his wife
repeated what his
mother once did,
alif, bey, tey….
That’s all I know
of him, such meagre
inheritance with which
I must reconstruct my
ancestors. I think
of mother, of father
what shall remain
of them, in the formalin
of family memory,
what shall the sons of my
sons and the daughters
of my daughters inherit,
what shall remain
of me, surely something
more definitive than
a tissue paper, crumpled
upon earth’s cutlery,
chequered with my lip
stains, saliva and
ketchup: sole evidence
that I once was,
in this city that persists
as a black stone
with no epitaph.