Afkar 9 Fikra is a new zine coming out of Liverpool for Arabs in the diaspora and I was lucky to be part of the first issue, which launched with a whole markers market by Arabs! I unfortunately wasn’t able to make it, but followed it on my socials.

This poem, Hide and Seek, I wrote many years ago now, and I’m pleased that it’s finally seen the light of publication. If you haven’t, check out the zine, support artists and buy a copy — it’s full of great new writing and art.

Hide and Seek

A mound: an ancestor sleeps.
I climb up.
I slide down.
I climb up like a kid who mounts dad
as dad bows down to God.
I kiss the warmth with lips my mother gave me,
pull away with the tang of oil.

A flat on the 14th floor in rainy London Town.
Or, perhaps it is the 17th floor. A flat devoid of roots
so its place hardly matters. Inside, a toddler maniacally
shreds an Oxford dictionary as if rejecting a prophecy.

A grave in Winchester:
A boy trips over a headstone
in this English city of dead.
“You’ve angered a ghost,”
(says a schoolmate prophet)
“it will haunt you seven years.”
Soon after, we move to Bahrain.
Britain latched to my gums.

A flat east of Bani Jamra’s graveyard.
المگبرة حديقتنا
Its roots spread deep.
Behind a half-built house, abandoned,
we pull steel from the foundations
like swords from stone, I draw Excalibur,
Jameel wields ذو الفقار. Hide and seek
trains a generation to evade arrest.
A highway paves over my oral history,
makes a ghetto of a mourning house.
A tyre burns at the intersection
of my grandmother’s village and the city.
الحرايگ بخور ديرتنا
There is rot in the air.

Jameel is handsome in prison:
he is exceptional at the game
but in the end the seeker wins.
Now he is a prayer.

A certain Captain Robert Taylor of the East India Company:
He reports that the water is too brackish for any but the indigenous.
Does it occur to him we have not invited him in for a drink?

A one-way ticket to Heathrow:
seven years have passed.
The rules of hide and seek have changed.
I stitch my mother’s accent to the roof of my mouth,
perform the Queen’s English.

An empty crater:
Once it pooled water,
then it burbled oil.
Lately, it was a grave.
I tumble down the chapped slopes
like a child who mounts dad
mid-bow and slips as dad rises.

A father who has shouldered a burden for a lifetime collapses.  

A crater is filled. Landfill.
A prison is filled. Landfill.

In Manchester, the cold seeps between my toes
and sighs up my joints. An unemployed dialect
gasps like a tyre fire.

I am waiting for someone to find me.