Father dreams of Gibran by Lory Bedikian

They are turning cups of coffee over
to tell each other’s fortunes. Khalil says

the sky is growing its beard, the darkness
an inevitable departure. My father turns over

pistachio shells to make small mounds
on the table, their mahogany becomes a desert.

Say they are brothers, for in this moment they are.
Khalil tells him there is no other way of being.

Father holds his face on his palms, distraught
as if the birds had brought bad news again.

Lebanon, 1932, Khalil has not died
but instead intoxicates himself with anise,

slow poems on the tongue, dissolving.
Say things will improve, but they won’t.

Buildings will fall, bodies will clutter
dirt roads, children will believe in nothing.

Decades later an orphanage the size
of a bird’s nest will open itself to fissures

of light, names of parents forgotten.
If anyone could reassure my father

that another road will open ahead of them
it was Khalil, his hands stained crimson,

kaleidoscope pieces of oil paint on his coat.
Lebanon, 1932, father born the year before,

nevertheless at this roadside café they sit solid
as cave rocks, debating on their next move

in backgammon. Father asks him
if he is afraid of death. Khalil laughs.

Father asks him if he and his wife
will make it to the new world. Questions

litter the night like the gutter rats,
the mosquitos who bite and thrive.

No wonder it takes so long for my father
to wake. We wait by his bedside, impatient

for a word or open eye. His stroke
another step closer to closing his world,

his tracheotomy, a fiddle in the fire.
No wonder no one can nudge him

to consciousness. Why would a man
want to come back to our moment,

so far from his newfound brother,
who meets him everyday to discuss

the stubborn cedar trees, the impossible
bond of the sparrow and the bulbul

in the midst of shrapnel and ouzo
despite the oncoming decades

as unpredictable as the letters
they don’t dare to open and read.

Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Her work was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Beyond Baroque Books, 2015 and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Her newer work has been published in Miramar, has recently been featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body” series and is included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House.