"Everything worthwhile is done with other people."
-Mariame Kaba
Samandar Ghaus is a Pakistani-American poet, gardener, and community organizer currently working on an MFA at Indiana University. They are a VONA/Voices of Our Nation fellow, a Tin House workshop alum, and the recipient of the 2020 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize. Their work can be found on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and poiesis, and they currently serve as Poetry Editor for Indiana Review.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Saami, what poems have you brought for us today?
EARTH WANTS US HERE
after Gabriela Kolčavá’s “Picking Mushrooms”
I almost didn’t see them, heads bowed
under the sparse birch crowns — isn’t this
what science calls biomimicry? Standing still
or walking slow in a forest, more velvet-headed
deer than human, on the lookout for a good
mushroom or two. Let’s call it, earth’s survival
strategy, and remember that people are trees,
too — which means this is also the people’s survival
strategy, to be a lovely long-legged animal or a river
birch or even a tall dead ash or a succulent
hunk of chicken-of-the-woods clinging
to a tree like a sign of something, like an
orange flag declaring life is possible and the world
is a delicious place! How I want to believe
this on my most blinding days, when a bottle
of pills looms closer than the freezer chanterelles,
(buttered, sauteed, salted from last August)
in my imagination of how the day might
end. You can see it in the photograph,
the whirlwind surrounding our people
and trees, our peopletrees (where I come from,
there is even a tree called peepal) — the leaf-
laden earth and the lichen-loved branches
swirling out of focus like my own desire to
be alive, which, wait for it, in the photograph
has the odd effect of sharpening the dark
eyes of the birch bark, calling to attention
how the trees are looking at us, and maybe
looking out for us, which is what I want
to say about people, too, that these two
friends in/of the forest would doff their thick
jackets for a sick wolf or lay a warm hand
on the forehead of a stranger, maybe my own —
sometimes to learn of the earth is to love it,
to look closely at its fevered face and feel the blossom-
soft tug of gravity saying, come here, or even, please
stay, and hear the mushrooms running their pale feet
into tributaries under the dark, soft ground,
and I want to stay looking through the worm-
hole of this hurricane eye in the photograph
so I might hear the chorus singing through today’s
dense rain, chaga and chestnut and heather and
moss, peepal and people and skein of puffball
mushrooms on an old sassafras log, clapping
their hands and harmonizing like the fox I saw
perfectly red and black under a canopy of sugar
maples last week, convincing me there is no
better way to tree than people, that there is no
better way to people than tree, to stare deep
into the unending sorrow at my oaken feet
and understand there are morels growing
there in the dark.
RAMADAN DASTARKHAN
for Queer Muslims of Boston & the Union Square Halaqa
Faint smell of feet & bedsheet on the floor. A steady
rise & fall of seats & the bell of laughter
too. A gathering of voices joking about jinns
& a hand slicing bean pie fresh from Detroit, my brother
I just met in a turban; his lover with eyebrows of two colors.
Pit bull melting in the middle of this living
room, whom we scoot to the side to pray maghrib,
all mixed up, gender to gender, as someone sings
the Fatihah. We who have never known the straight
path, make du’a for our siblings on the knife,
then pass around forks to eat the sweets
we made. We have no name
for this: our day-long hunger
blessed & the peals of laughter
flooding the dastarkhan.
We decide our children
will name it history
and unbothered
we eat
& eat
You've been listening to the poetry of Samandar Ghaus on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.