'Fifty April Years'

"Khaled Mattawa":http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaFacDetail.asp?ID=963 was a young child in Benghazi, Libya, when Moammar Gadhafi first came to power in 1969. Mattawa eventually came to the United States and made a life as a writer and scholar. He's published four collections of his own poetry, "Tocqueville" (New Issues Press, 2010); "Amorisco" (Ausable Press, 2008); "Zodiac of Echoes" (Ausable Press, 2003); and "Ismailia Eclipse" (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). He has also and translated and edited numerous volumes of Arabic writing for English readers. Mattawa is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan. "Jeffrey Brown spoke to Mattawa for Art Beat on Tuesday":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/03/conversation-khaled-mattawa.html, and we invited him back to be on the PBS NewsHour "for Wednesday's program.":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/libyapoet_03-02.html Below is a poem that he read for us. **Fifty April Years** By Khaled Mattawa A soldier waved our bus into a detour. We didn't pass by Parliament Square that day. I'd hoped to go to a pastry shop, coins I saved for a week. Southern winds, sun shrouded in dirty clouds, red tongues of dust on windowpanes. There'd been a hanging on the square. On the day of the hanging, my father drove home, a poster of the President on the hood of his car. He tried to explain. Over and over he said "survive." Once I believed forgetfulness was a gift from the gods, not an erosion of the soul. Now I know enough to say this has happened before, and even crueler things-- the bombardment of the ghetto as the republic ate its lunch in the park, held its toddlers, napped on lawns, smoke-sharp air fevered with the hiss of a flute. Don't ask. I too find myself listening to gurus who abhor coherence, who tell us language is a bucket of slop and we can only grunt and squeal. I wonder if they say this to silence the wretched who have found no words, who wave their torn limbs at us. This too has happened before: My brother and I snuck to the car the night of the hangings. We intended to tear the President's poster. But something held us, not a policeman's shadow or the neighborhood spy. Not even my father who hours before had gone to sleep.