GHAZAL FOR HELEN
Before the War, there is palm and fat and oil
In the droning black cave of mouth: minted oil
The Hedonists have shamrocked the Federal Reserve apart,
This tar-black reservation water is my country’s bare-glinted oil
No departure radical enough for the half-raped statue
Of a Goddess saffronized, her breasts in fingerprinted oil
Oh dear, it seems this ghazal has won no kind remarks
For its own sake, it must be revised until the body is disjointed oil
The metaphor of oil is tiresome unless one has spent a life
Taxed and retaxed in the currency of oceans’ mezzotinted oil
It seems no language may name the heat signature a body
makes before its last words are shed in an urn of tainted oil
Oh, Helen, with a coin over each eye — will you not pray
for this nation, your nation: in the religion of surprinted oil?
Amrita Nur is a writer from Philadelphia.