There is No Other Way to Say This
| Every morning the sparrows sing | Every day there is another funeral | |
| I am a fraud | ||
| A mouth is always open: 口 | The tongue declares itself: زبان | |
| I have to write this poem in English | ||
| I do not speak my mother’s language | I do not speak my father’s language | |
| I am not grateful for this country | ||
| Mama, I am begging: 帮我 | Baba, I am begging: کمک | |
| I move closer to a life without language | ||
| I push the skin below my jaw | I pluck my eyebrow strays | |
| I hunger for something I’ve yet to taste | ||
| Chopsticks rip the duck flesh | The blistered tomato splatters | |
| The language burns and sticks | ||
| The country burns and burns | ||
| I hate saying America | ||
| Hearing America | ||
| I do not sing America and I do not want to | ||
| 妈妈, I know all you gave up for this | بابا, I know it scares you to hear this | |
| There are too many truths here | ||
| These are some of them | ||
| Without you there is no us | Without you there is no us | |
| I am sorry | ||
| I am ungrateful | ||
| I am out of metaphors | ||
| What do these tanks remind you of | Does this new life still ring of prison | |
| Exiled and found your way back to more of the same | ||
| A haunting | A prediction | |
| I don’t know if there’s a better place for us | ||
| What refuge is this | ||
| What trickery | ||
| Oh | ||
| A lineage of pain | A once-held future | |
| Would I give my existence for it | ||
| 你的生命 | زندگی تو | |
| Like a river takes back its rain | ||
| Like a droplet ripples home | ||
Edited by Bretty Rawson and Emilie Menzel.
The featured image is “Forest Interior with Stream” by John Frederick Kensett (ca. 1860-1870), selected and manipulated specifically for Saba's poem by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.
