after losing a country.

JOY HARJO

Postcolonial Love Poem

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,

can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this

when the war ended. The war ended

depending on which war you mean: those we started,

before those, millennia ago and onward,

those which started me, which I lost and won—

these ever-blooming wounds.

I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—

always another campaign to march across

a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin

settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.

I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you

the hard pull of all my thirsts—

I learned Drink in a country of drought.

We pleasure to hurt, leave marks

the size of stones—each a cabochon polished

by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel

turning—green mottled red—

the jaspers of our desires.

There are wildflowers in my desert

which take up to twenty years to bloom.

The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand

until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them

in its copper current, opens them with memory—

they remember what their god whispered

into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.

Where your hands have been are diamonds

on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—

I am your culebra.

I am in the dirt for you.

Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,

two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash

before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—

the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.

Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,

blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold

the shape of any great hand—

Great hands is what she called mine.

The rain will eventually come, or not.

Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—

the war never ended and somehow begins again.

We admitted that we were human beings

and melted for love in this desert.

MAHMOUD DARWISH

Blood-Light

My brother has a knife in his hand.

He has decided to stab my father.

This could be a story from the Bible,

if it wasn’t already a story about stars.

I weep alacranes—the scorpions clatter

to the floor like yellow metallic scissors.

They land upside down on their backs and eyes,

but writhe and flip to their segmented bellies.

My brother has forgotten to wear shoes again.

My scorpions circle him, whip at his heels.

In them is what stings in me—

it brings my brother to the ground.

He rises, still holding the knife.

My father ran out of the house,

down the street, crying like a lamplighter—

but nobody turned their lights on. It is dark.

The only light left is in the scorpions—

there is a small light left in the knife too.

My brother now wants to give me the knife.

Some might say, My brother wants to stab me.

He tries to pass it to me—like it is a good thing.