Siham Karami Reads For Us

Wildlings, today we have the joy of listening to Featured Artist Siham Karami read to us from her poetry collection ‘To Love The River’.
You can purchase a copy here!
In the meantime, let her words soothe you…

Gently Still Finding You Between

spirals in the shell you left behind,
on staircases, in tiny unseen rooms,
interstices, hidden ventricles,
auricles collapsed and yet alive,
imaginary origami hearts,
a nautilus still pumping through the days
that lost you in their downy underside
like sepals undernoticed, or a potted
cactus near the window no one looks through.
What liquids had been stored in you for years?
Love or some restrained guffaw or blooming
should have burst through sediment and rock.
So much to say, we found no way to talk.
The droplets never touched the cavern floor—
bonded to the minerals that melt
in geologic time, you are no more,
although your shape still shadows my old thoughts:
a gentle tapping on the window’s cold.
A film of rain coats footprints on the stairs.

Aware

A child’s prayers are fragile things
like beetle eyes, mosquito wings,
the weight of something counted on
cast upon the water where
they’re intimately close, aware
that all they love could soon be gone,
the pebbles sink, your wishes drown—
and as you watch the ripplings spread,
a spider hanging by a thread
holds a universe mid-air.

❖❖❖

To Love the River

You wouldn’t like how my delicate arms
flailed uselessly in the rapids,
or the dim green diorama
of death where I spent my oblivion
under the river’s ripped shoulders.
You’d love the river, its violence
unimpeachable, its long breath
a single unbroken word
so beautiful it breaks you apart,
ejaculated into eternity, a sound
like your bloodstream echoing through
a giant aorta, the sound
of a galaxy’s spiral arms, distant,
yet here! Loud above you, the surface—
and you are no match for this.
You long for the soft march of birch trees
and their attendant wings, dragonflies,
the infinitesimal reach of delicate things.
Like me, you pump extremities
to no avail. The river
may throw us onto a rock
to go on living. We are not heroes.
Our home is a forest of weaker things.
We name this place, wade onto shore,
settle into leaves and conversation.
And in the middle of our little words,
some enormity pulls us deeper
and neither of us can laugh our way
out of this. Nothing else matters.
Its currents shift our pulse, our course.
If I must drown, let it be like this.