Gentlest of Bleeding Things by Ali Choudhary

Gentlest of Bleeding Things
Ali Choudhary

Somebody told me grief is the door
and not the room. I had spent most of my life
thinking each entrance, each slight
interstice in the walls was an invitation for darkness.
How I let it fester and saturate. How I allowed it
to tire me without letting me collapse
from it. When I wrote poems about trauma,
the words on the page shut their eyes,
and could not look at me again. I have tired language and
now I create sentences like journeys without destinations.
Today, I thought about Palestine,
the olives, the cafés peppering the shoreline,
the beautiful children, the pained sky waiting for silence
to speak again. I went down to the beach in the
afternoon for the first time in eight months.
On the sapphire of water, a boat circled
the palm of the ocean. On the boat,
bodies touched each other through the curtains of dream.
I have wanted to be a beautiful thing for all my life,
I’ve swarmed the world looking for it
without realising my face has been turned
away the whole journey.