Lemon Blossoms
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2018 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
In Miss Sahar's Arabic class, we learned
to conjugate the verb saar,
a variant of the past tense.
We learned that to describe what became
of the people after the war
we would have to remember a tray of cheese pastries
supple and pale, nestled in neat rows.
We would have to remember
the people who knead the cheese and semolina
into dough, silken yards of it,
stretched into pliant tenderness by their hands.
We would have to remember
the people who harvest the Aleppo pistachios
and with their thumbnails slit the skin
of the fruit down to the bone-white shell,
excise the nut-meat and crush it to powder.
We would have to remember
the people who gather the lemon blossoms,
bathe the petals in syrup and ease
them over a quiet flame
to make a garnet-colored jam.
We would have to remember
the people who make the cheese pastries
stuffed with sweetened cream,
the pistachios now a spring-colored dust,
the lemon blossoms a blood-bright garnish,
the people now besieged, eating weeds
and sipping soiled snow that pools
in craters of rubble throughout the camp.
This is how we learned to conjugate saar.
