Rasma Haidri
Rasma Haidri Poems
From the window we watched the skunk mother
Waddle legless through our lawn.
...
Today the water is still.This is what they call mirror-water, glass-water, quiet-face-of-the-sky-water.If you could have waited ten years my son, my daring boy, the water off the break wall would have been this water:calm, cradle-safe for even a baby, my baby, you, my rumble tumble boy.
But no, today you would have been twenty-eight, too old, too safe, too cautious to be my boy, my lost youth boy, my just man, just barely grown boy, my climbing see me jump Ma! see how high I am boy.
...
- for Jason
How does a mother get ready for bed
the night her son hangs himself?
...
Tonight
in the high-rise windows
Christmas lights
flicker
...
We are deep mystery.
We are known to no one.
We contain a multitude
...
Once a year, for seven years, I watched
terrified by the tornado and snatching trees,
baffled by Dorothy walking all that way
without eating, and not once needing
...
In my dream the neighbor girl and her father
are night prowling through our yard
looking for Barbie's bathrobe.
...
My child buried a butterfly
in our driveway, one wing
disembodied and perfect,
it lay like a Chinese fan
...
It is early morning when my daughter
stumbles down the hall making noises
that could be words, or birdsong,
or leftover memory of angel tongue.
...
Everything my mother needs can be found at Woodman's:
cigarettes, milk, unsalted rice cakes, and six black bottles
of diet cola. I want to buy a lottery ticket she adds,
weaving stiff-kneed, half-blind, to the far corner,
...
My daughter is in his lap like flowers,
like the bouquet delivered to the door
three days later. But that is not the miracle.
The miracle is my mother appearing uninvited,
...
There is girl clutter on the floor:
hairbrushes, ribbons, plastic glitter
and socks.
...
Rasma Haidri Biography
American author. For more about Rasma visit www.rasma.org.)
The Best Poem Of Rasma Haidri
Letter To A Young Child
To write a small note
each day of his first-born's life
did not seem too big a task.
My father's small squared printing
filled the three-cent postcards.
They are yellowed now.
The blue ballpoint lines
flattened under age-brittle
strips of cellophane tape.
Later, I watched his hands writing.
It may have been an address,
a list of errands, a letter home
the musical Arabic curving backwards
like a path to retrieve dreams. I loved
his nails shining like quarter moons
under clear lacquer polish, his long fingers
moving the pen delicately, as with reverence
for a living thing.
In old college notebooks
where his dissertation notes left off, I wrote.
A city newspaper, spy plans, interviews on Viet Nam,
my first French words: Bonjour, Je suis, J'habite
a day by day record of my life
in stories, poems, letters to no one
or to the world.
Thus the art is handed down
in pens, the love of paper,
the evening hush in a house
where nothing is said
but by the one writing
to the one who has yet to receive.
When you were two,
I bought a large sketchbook
and began to write.
The small pack of my father's postcards
teaches me to promise nothing.
Only to write, and to imagine him
standing in white shirtsleeves
his script as measured as the pulse
beating in his temples
in the late night house
when he had only us
and all the time in the world.
(first published in Passages North, Northern Michigan University Press,1998)
Rasma Haidri Comments
Rasma Haidri Quotes
Ammaji says, write for the necessity of joy, and the joy of necessity. Focus on process and you will produce. Focus on product and you thwart yourself again and again.
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