Marilyn Krysl has published seven books of poetry and three of stories, as well as poems in The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic. She has received two NEA fellowships and the Lawrence Foundation Prize for fiction. She is former Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has taught ESL in the People’s Republic of China, served as Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked as a volunteer for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, and volunteered at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. She just returned from Sri Lanka for the 6th time, where she volunteered for an NGO that works in Tsunami relief and peace-making among the three ethnic groups on the island. Her book Warscape with Lovers received the 1996 CSU Poetry Center Prize.
4 Ghazals for the Turn of the Century
1)
The elephant, bound, thinks longingly
of the elephant grave.
--The Hinayana
Look: see the peasant blasted at his crop.
The refugees kidnapped, made to carry ammunition.
The missiles dismantled, rebuilt, reinstalled.
The carcinogenic apples, the bereft gorilla mother.
The Vietnam vet propped against plate glass.
The six-year-old girl, the photographs of the body.
Friend phones long distance, love affair going badly.
I’ve forgotten the word for the double bladed axe.
Meanwhile the sky goes on with its watercolor.
Leaves, gorgeous, fall. The baby cries to be fed.
I feed the baby, watch the sky do its masterpiece.
The peasant again, rice green, his face burst open.
3)
Watch my chic black. I attract the damaged man.
He sees a deep breast, a spring of milk.
He thinks if he touches me, if I let him touch me,
his hands will heal, he will play the piano again,
and his feeling, boarded up in rage,
will come forth and stand in the light, upright.
He imagines the water, its hands, their balm.
He imagines the queen in her fat honeycomb.
I take the first plane to the other side of the world.
When I arrive, he’s there, waiting.
He thinks love heals, he thinks I am the healer.
He imagines the damaged can repair one another.
11)
When they shaved my head, I agreed I deserved it.
When they shaved me below, I agreed I deserved it.
They took the money for drugs. I told the girl, No bread.
They took the money for guns. I told the boy, Go to work.
Nor did I question the accidents, the disappearances,
though by then I knew they were lying.
Then they came for me, they held my head under water.
They let me breathe. They held me under again.
Three held me down while the others hurt me.
Look: here they carved their names on my body.
They made me dig, go in the hole, lie down.
They filled the hole. They piled on stones.
This is the place. You are in the presence of gods.
Don’t lie. When you lie the gods have to wait.
The books have been burned. There are no instructions.
This is the bottom. Proceed without instructions.
12)
for Hedda Nussbaum, 1989
Black is the color of my true love’s hair
Black is the color of her face, it’s torn flap
Black is the color of my hands, fallen off
Black is the color of his teeth, fallen out
Black is the color of his mouth as he eats
Black is the color of her orphan name between his teeth
Black is the color of the first day I let him hurt her
Black is the color of the first day I helped him hurt her
Black is the color of the last day I helped him hurt her
Black is the color of the bathroom floor, the water
Black is the color of the days that stretch behind me
Black is the color of the days that stretch before me
Black is the color of now; this moment
Black my charred heart at the center of this moment
By Marilyn Krysl.
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