I’m more alive than I am afraid

A poetic conversation between Fariha Róisín and Hala Alyan

Ana Mendieta, Siluteta Series Work, 1973

I’m More Alive Than I Am Afraid

After Hala

Despair is never a prophecy of will

we’ve been roped into an ineluctable

universe, propped up & charaded

by haste, greed & Biblical levels 

of genocide. 

What say you, 

sons of Abraham, 

how did thee herald in the new age?

Struck hungry with skin & bones

I’m bored by American twee,

hands locked behind one’s back,

in a torrid embrace,

denial, a right to be.

Tenuous narcissism stokes

the Liberal’s heart;

as Orwell evoked, ignorance is bliss.

The ululation moves through me,

the vibration hits 

like the vibrato tongue

cobalt, like a hiss.

The anger seethes 

like a nightingale

I hate how righteous 

capitalism makes us

how ill-willed 

& frantic we move

with no remorse 

& no reflection, too.

We have grown 

hard-hearted & stale

we’ve sucked the earth bone dry

polluting her rivers, a succubus to the

plants leaving her now 

lacklustre and pale.

I am hurt by the dissonance, coy

how humans forget that there is

but one God—time is running out

I wonder what it will take for us

to become a people who honor death

who then thereby 

love life and never toy

with the deep mystery 

of mortality

& how this life surges 

from one current to the next

hoping for better will,

for a new honorable day.

I am tilling the soil to cherish

every moment with her dirt, 

with this apricot heart, 

the way earth smells 

holy & clean

iron packed like blood, 

purified by our display

of commitment & resilience 

to revise our insolence. 

A garden blooms everytime

I look at you,

I call this worship, 

how the wind is so urgent, 

the fire so radiant,

water swallowed by memory, 

trees earth struck, 

rooted like a banyan, 

cascading

on those Gangetic plains. 

I smell the forest,

bright and high, 

resin-dew, 

sap-like leaves

fresh as fresh can be. 

The camphor burns

and I sit like a lotus, 

a shapla phool,

sun beaten and sugar rushed.

May my body feed millions,

stretched out like an orange rind,

unbound, the tang of crushed peaches, 

let my body, this body of clay, 

mean something in this

life to the next, 

open, willful, humble.

I am ready to be compost, 

Chris Abani writes:

“this slow decomposition that is /life.”

I lean towards optimism, 

there is a new day,

but death will find you, find us,

& how will we arrive 

at that horizon?

In this remembering

we can find life, 

miraculous, like the sun,

astonishing in its orbital,

O Moon,

my ruler, how I’ll flutter at your loss,

how the cosmos tastes 

sacred

when you understand that this

life is but just one & yet, 

even still

I have learned to love 

heart aflame.

My anecdote to pain 

has been to love harder.

Nobody showed me this way, 

I found my way back to you

on my own, knowing my compass, 

drawing commisersation

from Joan, your divine servant. 

I have always heard you God

beckon me bright, 

my heart asunder, freedom is

loving myself & giving my all 

to this great earth

knowing no matter what comes 

I did what I came here to do, 

to liberate myself. 

May this space & time 

continuum

remember that I was here 

& that, despite it all, 

there was always love.

Burn brighter soul, for

how astonishing a thing,

that no matter what,

love is remarkable

because it carries,

because it remains.