Song

by Lisa Suhair Majaj 


If the song is silent for a while it doesn’t mean
it isn’t a song anymore. When the sun goes dark
it’s someone else’s sun for the night. Same
for the moon—sliver or sphere, it’s luminous
somewhere. Even black holes have their music,
deep and chanting. The ones who died last night
had a song they sang their whole lives, or that
sang them, though maybe they didn’t hear it
all the time. They set out over dark waters,
boats pulling further and further away, droplets
clinging to oars, ripples of light behind.
Into the blackest chasm the stars fall, one by one.
The dark holds them for a while. Then earth
continues its orbit, and they shine again.


* * * * *

Lisa Suhair Majaj is author of Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press Poetry Prize winner) and two children’s books, as well as creative nonfiction and literary analysis. Her writing has been widely published and translated into several languages, and appears in different venues, including the 2016 exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art). She lives in Cyprus.