Hedy Habra

After Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Apollo and Daphne  Borghese Gallery.

  

You can feel the wind in their faces,

lifting their clothes. 

Frozen in flight, bodies strung,

unable to surrender,

for a fraction of time

his hand on her left thigh

is the closest to possession.

 

Stretched between earth and sky,

her raised arms reach

the highest leaves,

feet anchored, veins

merge in a web of darkness

 

as her skin hardens

under his fingers,

she yearns to feel a while longer

the warmth invading

a body no longer hers,

enveloping

 

like breeze through long curls,

numbing her steps

face leaning towards

her pursuer, eyes lowered,

looking back in vain,

 

unable to contemplate the cause

of her change,

mouth agape, sadness

fills her with sap

as she loses her substance,

loses her lover,

loses love.

First published by Sulphur Literary Review

 

Antlers                                                           

  

In the center of the white

lace, two bronze deer

face each other,

antlers charcoal drawn,

branches in snow

copied from Monarchs'

wings. Their necks bear

burning candles,

a cold flame casting

shadows on the bare walls.

Two gypsy dancers,

backs arched in a duel,

sworn to die for love,

prostrated in medias res,

delay the ritualistic

holocaust.

 

Nearby, in candlelight,

two women talk in sign

language. Their body's

slightest motion falls, 

unstrummed notes

in a guitar concerto. 

I wonder if one

should be deaf to listen. 

If one should hibernate

to see a hand

extended in one's direction.

 

I turn to the deer,

the centerpiece

in that Christmas Season.

In the semi-darkness,

wavering chiaroscuro

instills life

to their immobile dance.

 

So much takes place

in shaded areas concealed

by the artist's pencil,

If only one could 

guess what failure

lies behind

a brushstroke,

 

and sense what is lost

when lips, a pale

reflection of thought, 

speak in a tongue foreign

to one's heart.                                 

And who is to say

what words stay in the way

when two lovers stand still

under the streetlights,

stiff in the icy night, their

clouded, bronze hearts,

unable to become

transparent.

 

What if a hunter

came, a lover turned hunter,

stealthily close,

face to face?

He knows where bone

meets bone, where the flesh

is soft. Like the dancer,

he calculates

his move, raises his arm 

as my shadow leans

against the wall.

 

First published by Parting Gifts

 

 

A Writer's File

 

He is a collector, his fetishes creations

   of his own, fit for a wax museum.

He has made love with his favorites

on a hammock, a tree, under a waterfall,

a gargoyle, a lapidary stone,

a tin gutter, in a streetcar, a limo, a parking lot,

a confessional,

or even from a distance

across shelves in the public library.

He has given them a voice,

   enough pain to cry or kill, go into exile

or take their own lives.

 

Then comes a morning when satisfied,

   ecstatic, he shuffles them all, making fun

of those he spent days and nights

convincing to say and do as he pleases,

   folds his last oeuvre

and lets it rest among his files.

 

He often thinks of a woman he once knew,

   of how she followed him under the rain

attentive to the uneven sound

of his steps on the pavements, 

   of their long evenings together,

how she always read behind his shoulder,

   how he could feel

the lift and pause of her breath,

how she met his characters

in imaginary streets,

saw them love, die, heard them sigh

under the melting moon,

   getting closer and closer until she slipped

between the pages

as he closed his manuscript,

   unaware of a presence so familiar

like the ticking of his grandfather's clock,

placed the folder in the bottom drawer, 

locked it and left. 

   As time went by

he inadvertently lost the key. 

 

Catlike, she got used to the dark,

   felt her way, sliding

through lines she knew so well,

changing, altering, erasing,

until she stopped hurting,

   until she lost her eyesight,

until her hair turned gray,

until she could no longer remember.

Because she’d been pressed for so long,  

   between so many layers,

rubbed in ink                   

in an impossible space,

she vanished, losing her substance. 

   All that remained was a faded image,

like the imprint of a butterfly's wing. 

 

And one day, because he was offered

   a new job,

was moving to a different city,

or perhaps had misplaced

a receipt, an address or a bill,

   he forced the lock and leafed through

his forgotten chapters,

found a pale black and white watercolor

of an old, unknown woman.

Startled, he noticed all his characters

   sounded like him. 

There was no trace left

of her passage in his life.

He looked at the mirror and did not recognize himself.

 

First published by Sulphur Literary Review 

  

  

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019), Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and Finalist for the Best Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the Best Book Award and the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A sixteen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, and recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/