Across the screen voices once unseen
From laughter to love
Once only a dream
Distance fades with just one key
Opening doors as easy as fixing a seam
A student in Azerbaijan
And one sat next to me
One across oceans and seas
Not a quick drive, no meeting for dinner tonight
Different languages fill the sky
Different cultures, different replies
One watches sunrise paint the hills
One is telling me how to fly
A word is spoken, repeated twice
A careful smile follows a mistake
What once seemed strange becomes familiar
With every lesson that we take
Maps hang quiet on the wall
Borders drawn in ink and time
Yet every class reminds me
The world is large and small
ocean divided, but screen United
I open my eyes.
All around me,
everything is unfamiliar:
unfamiliar wallpaper,
unfamiliar white leather sofa,
unfamiliar country.
I moved here to teach,
and here I am learning
that I’m underprepared,
underqualified,
underdressed,
and hungover.
He wouldn’t let me leave last night,
you see.
As the party was dying,
I coloured his bathroom
with oversweet Georgian wine
and washed down chicken wings
that came back up.
He decided:
I could miss the last metro,
sleep on this atrocious sofa,
recover.
Of course,
now it’s 7am,
and I have to teach a class
of engineers,
bridge builders,
about ing phrasal verbs
in less than two hours.
And I have to do it
with a hangover and a smile.
I think to myself
as I struggle with front door locks and keys
before climbing out of a downstairs window,
what a strange story this will be.
And yet waking up here,
it could be a whole lot worse
than this beautiful Baku sunrise.
She used to write letters to mother
She used to write from Azerbaijan.
She was learning to stich ‘koblan’
She was raising my little niece.
She had the sharpest face of us all.
Mother used to tell often times
Azerbaijan, an almost prohibited name
Where I belong in current time.
* (Saturn is esoterically associated with the twelfth month of December)
… raining, raining! – disrobed heaven’s
chain of glittering tears
washing our earthen face, and
I raise my umbrella
thinking of you
in the shattered liquid glass
around us…
… warmth of our enveloping womb…
* * *
… let’s cross the *lyric mountains
to the sunset and beyond,
not satisfied until we reach
the dawn we
hold in each others hands…
* (for the Lerik Mountains in Azerbaijan)
* * *
… narcissists, your glorious eyes
feeding on me, boiling-ravenous
smacking lips,
glutted upon our saturnalian feast…
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