ISSUE 5
Sam Yaziji
The Mute Earth Cast Out Her Dead
Damascus, 638
The cracked soil—its entrails lathered over
our cheeks and chins—blossoms beneath
the prism of anemic black and brackish green.
A forkèd tongue of chilly light splinters off
the waxy Seraph-wing dangling above,
and lodges in our threadbare temples’ loamy
flesh. Our throats scarf down the enemy’s stench
of starch and honey. We have melted our
temple-bells into arrowheads. Their swords
have carved our stylites’ hearts into mere
ventricles, tongue-tied and weeping a final
hymn, as charcoal-dust erupts the world
around. Creation’s ragged border has been
ignited—the Cherubim flee to pastures
more cornucopian than our Byzantine soil
of char and spent husk. The war-drums spark
the sky-lid, our black robed ones open their hands
and chant their Psalms to the Ancient of Days.
—
Your mother’s eyes are pomegranate-ringed.
She cups your face, her palms lather your cheeks.
Your father stares at a point just above your head,
a jasmine sprig in the dimpled stone.
His leather-clad foot fidgets with a fragment
of severed glass. The horn calls—
He takes his makeshift weapon and marches
into mute earth to meet them as they sleep
in the Damascus night’s dead arms.
- titled after a line in Georg Trakl’s Psalm II
(trans. Will Stone)
Sam Yaziji is a poet from Miami, Florida. He is currently a first-year MFA student at San Diego State University. He is also a painter of Byzantine icons.