Deema Shehabi (born 1970) is a Kuwaiti-born poet and writer. The daughter of Palestinian parents, she relocated to the United States in 1988. Her poems, for which she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize, have been widely published in literary journals and compiled in anthologies. She now lives in California.
Achievements and Awards
– She was nominated for a Pushcart prize
– Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals including The Atlanta Review, Bat City Review, Crab Orchard, The Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Kenyon Review.
She has published works in anthologies such as The Poetry of Arab Women and Contemporary Arab-American Poetry . Deema Shehabi has also worked in writing and editing for several book publishers and magazines, including Ulysses Press, Nuclear Times, and most recently, Veggie Life where she was managing editor.
Gate of Freedom
Lovers of asparagus, alive
as hummingbirds, place their nostrils
over a low cloud, wet of air.
It’s the year of green hills
in California that early spring;
the evening is blue-split between the first
snow on the mountain top,
and a computer screen, where news of a man
whose body is eating itself, scythes
the long-stemmed breaths in the room.
“Do not weep if my heart fails,” he writes.
“I am your son.”
Gate of Love
Son I have. Your hands bulge
with pear tree blossoms.
You are bellow and sweat,
hunger and bread.
I part the fog to find you
through a grimy crowd of kids.
Before you give in to the affection
that soils you in public
Of harvest and flight
Beneath a wet harvest of stars in a Gaza sky,
my mother tells me how orchards
once hid the breach of fallen oranges,
and how during a glowing night
of beseeching God in prayer,
when the night nets every breath
of every prayer,
my uncle, a child then, took flight
from the roof of the house.
The vigilant earth had softened
just before his body fell to the ground,
but still there’s no succumbing to flight’s abandon;
our bodies keep falling on mattresses,
piles of them are laid out on living room floors
to sleep multitudes of wedding visitors:
the men in their gowns
taunt roosters until dusk,
while women taunt
with liquid harvest in their eyes,
and night spirits and soldiers
continue to search the house
between midnight and three in the morning.
On the night of my uncle’s nuptial,
I watch my mother as she passes
a tray of cigarettes to rows of radiant guests
with a fuschia flower in her hair . . . .
Years before this, I found a photograph
of her sitting on my father’s lap,
slender legs swept beneath her,
like willow filaments in river light.
His arm was firm around her waist;
his eyes bristled, as though the years of his youth
were borders holding him back
and waiting to be scattered.
Those were the years when my mother
drew curtains tightly over Windows
to shut out the frost world of the Potomac;
she sifted through pieces of news
with her chest hunched over a radio,
as though each piece when found
became a story and within it
a space for holding our endless
debris. But in truth,
it was only 1967, during the war,
three years before I was born . . . .
But tonight, in Gaza beneath the stars,
I turn towards my mother
and ask her how a daughter
can possibly grow beyond
her mother’s flight. There’s no answer;
instead she leans over me
with unreadable long-ago eyes
and points to the old wall:
the unbolting of our roots there,
beside this bitter lemon tree,
and here was the crumbling
of the house of jasmine
arching over doorways,
the house of roosters
and child-flight legends,
this house of girls
with eyes like simmering seeds.
Further Reading:
–Deema Shehabi’s debut poetry book is Thirteen Departures from the Moon
Sources:
