Amira

It's been a month. My apologies. And I left you on such a sour note. I promise I recovered from Beach Reach and I view it as a positive experience. I have much to write. Pero, this will be a short update. I wrote a poem about Christine for my poetry class and I thought I would post it. This isn't the final draft, per say. But it has been under some revisions and I'm going to turn it in on Friday for the class to discuss. Here it is:

Amira

She is in love with life
with beauty and justice and the unborn.
She grew plants on her balcony in Egypt
even though she couldn't stand the smell of the outside air
or Egypt's unfair repression of its women.

Her foreign loneliness inspired her
to create unique evening dishes in her humble kitchen,
to tenderness towards pharaoh's wandering cats,
and to sleeping until noon.
It burnt her with its sharp rays
on birthdays and holidays,
Christ's birth ignored in lieu of Ramadan latterns.
She missed bacon.

During month eleven she discovered
for less than $1 three people can get full on homemade falafel.
She is jaded by this place - like Roman ruins
covered by a filthy montropolis.
Where is her center stone
where her voice will be heard?
She has so much to say.

Her eyes were wet with affection
walking arm in arm with me that night -
crossing timidly over the dark streets
repeatedly cursed by the bad tempers
of greedy taxi drivers.
Our husbands let us weep
as two women
now reunited
stumbled over the broken stones
and the inevitable, slow passage of time.