Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Curlew, The Ink Pantry, A New Ulster, Down in the Dirt, the PLJ, and Mad Swirl.

Inefficacy

What can a million tears retrieve
or the most eloquent of sobs retract?
What can a smile besieged by fears
resurrect from the embers of the past?
What can a billion words redeem
or an endless deluge of regrets?
How can a glance bereft of speech
renew discourse that’s robbed of light?
What about a sky replete with prayers
waiting to be heard for centuries past?
How can a kiss with withered lips
endow the dead with eternal life?
How can our beads, devoid of zeal
entrap the prowling Anti-Christ?

[The word prowling is inspired by Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”]

Robust Threads

She has been darning the holes of her tattered life
with a rusted needle and a thread that with fabric jars,
a canvas of patched, discolored and discordant stripes.

The man she loved is slumbering next to a pearl.
Many tombstones pay tributes to broken bonds.
And her lean dog has stopped licking her paws.

Fermenting beneath are the desires she repelled.
So are the dreams she convicted and quelled.
And who can curb the revolt of a persecuted self

that rips the shroud of illusive content,
re-spins a mantle with robust threads,
reweaves a life with an unwavering will?

The beauty of so many little things

Our prayers are usually very long like our shopping lists.
We beseech a series of actions, possessions, and retaliatory feats.
Some lubricate their demands with refulgent tears,
others, with a threatening and eminent loss of faith,
but all expect miracles after such persistence.

My life has been quite far from the semblance of bliss,
yet I bask in the beauty of so many little things
of the Autumn leaf that reclines on my window sill,
of the ripple that reverberates through my ribs,
of the song that resides between my lips,
of the breeze the fills my nostrils with thrills,
of the starlight that entrances my irises,
of the scent that kindles fragrant remembrance,
of the endearing word that endows my days with peace.