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Best Poems From
LAALA KASHEF ALGHATA
(18 February 1990)
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13.
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Kiss My Knuckles While I Hold Your Soul
I write beauty like light in glass,
fleeting and unique. I want to catch
your tears and put a stop to the sadness
that threatens to envelope us
and propel us into obscurity. So kiss my knuckles
while I hold your soul and let us see
what comfort we can give our aching hearts.
I told the world to cry diamonds
because that’s how much pain is worth
and as your eyes dropp I catch a gem,
note its radiance,1.28 carats
of distress resting in my hand like thunder.
I smile into your mouth, my remedy
to your every malady, let my eyes
scream laughter and let my gaze fall
on you. You tilt your head back
and I bow my body down.
I take your fingers in mine and between
us we’re clasping your so soul tightly
it begins to bleed. You say, look how I hurt.
I say, yes, but dear, most wisdom stems from pain.
Laala Kashef Alghata
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14.
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Love is in Our Breath
Love comes in many different
apparitions. In a warm mug
of hot chocolate pressed
into your hands some
winter afternoon, to that kiss
they place on your forehead
to help you fall asleep.
Love dances around our arms
as we pull each other into
an embrace. It creates the warmth
that tickles our hearts,
that makes us smile.
Love is in our breath
when we place hot kisses
on our partner's lips,
it's in the food
we offer to the poor.
Love lives and is resurrected
despite its many deaths.
Love is in our words.
Not just poets', not just in Shakespeare's
verses or Eliot's or Donne's,
but in all of us. In saying take care
before we disperse.
In saying, I love you
in a hoarse voice.
Laala Kashef Alghata
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15.
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Scream Art
We dissolve and corrode in our own memories
of faults and scraped knees, of little children
who bullied us and now, looking back, seem
so breakable and fragile; how were we ever scared?
We hide tokens behind in our childhood just in case
we get a ticket back someday so that we can look
into a string of evil eyes and see our lives floating by,
not quickly and in one breath but slowly, like our brains
are on backward speed, our relative velocity is
negative in relation to that of the rest of time.
We wonder when we will stop painting
lipstick mouths and girls with smooth, glossy legs;
when will we be true to ourselves and appear
natural, our legs unshaven, and refuse to conform?
So we paint what we cannot yet be, perhaps
never can become, and let the world beg of us
to decipher our unconventional paintings:
we are only worthy when we decide to cross boundaries.
We used to love being trapped in candy-striped
hula-hoops, flinging our hips and counting past
a hundred, laughing as we break our best friend’s
records, being admired, applauded, and receiving
powdery kisses on our foreheads from our mothers
saying, “congratulations, sweetheart” and asking
if we would show them how good we are. Never mind
that we were not always good, never mind that we hurt
people sometimes in an effort to be called wonderful.
We are those girls who refused to wear shorts
underneath their dresses to go to school, but ran
anyway, our underwear flashing until our mothers
realised and forced us to choose between being a lady
and wearing shorts underneath our dresses, to hide
the shame of being told what colour underwear we had on.
We are the girls who loved art, but even at eight years
had formed our own opinions, breezily claiming Van Gogh’s
flowers stupid, Picasso a genius. When we saw the Mona Lisa
we snorted, asking what was so important about her mundane
smile and disregarding Da Vinci’s artwork, shaking our heads
(as if we were adults) and walking out of the Louvre, saying,
That was pathetic, not nearly worth its surrounding hysteria.
We’ve grown now, we’re the in-betweens, the girls who
nobody knows quite what to do with, not old enough
to be taken too seriously but too old to be ignored.
We’re the ones with avid opinions of our own and dark
eyeliner in sharp lines around our eyes, kohl weaved carefully,
reading whenever possible and constantly creating: poetry,
paintings, photography. We visit the galleries that no one
else knows what to make of, befriend new authors and artists,
swapping ideas, relating our work to each other’s.
We go to artists’ houses and spend hours pouring over
their work with them, feeling colour and texture and getting
re-inspired, realising our dreams between two lines of colour
scratched into a surface of acrylic and mixed media. We learn
from those artists and create our own work, shrouded in
our identity, work that may seem simple or otherwise
too complicated; yet we are more conceptual than you,
we dare to have our work free, elastic, to be understood
on many different levels that we ourselves did not consciously mean.
Our art does not always define us (we are too much for that) ,
but our work will continually define those who relate to it.
Laala Kashef Alghata
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16.
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Texts of Emotion and Unique Fingerprints
My senses are imbedded deep within my mind’s monastery
with monks scribbling in focus to copy texts of my emotions
to record feelings and lies into my subconscious and desert
me in my reality, to make me able to wake from dreams
of all-consuming darkness, of my heart disappearing
and dissolving with acid to corrode life, those that I hold precious
unavailable, miles in between some of us and lies between
the others, such tight knots that life knits in the canvas
of our skin, irreplaceable prints of significance making
everyone unique unto themselves, a fingerprint to the world,
but an identity to me
Laala Kashef Alghata
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