It is hard to translate
By Sarah Husain
It's hard to translate
to decompose and compose
sayings between sheets of,
'Tum Moom ho. Moom!"
Wax. That shapes and reshapes
this body of your imagining, hands
that slipped off my skin
forming curves
shadows
I'm against fantasies
altering this present hardness of
reciprocity
between two people who understand the language
but not each other
"Tum moom ho. Moom!"
melting hot wax
thoughts, in your bed that first night
where we laid naked
inhaling
slipping air
between words
naked,
meaning translated
in a skin game of a language
only spoken
in those melting spaces
just spoken.
Tum Moom ho! Moom!
Han! Mai Moom hoon! Moom!"
that I could melt
yes, that I had melted.
Naked. I had been translated.
Sarah Husain is a Pakistani-American spoken word poet. She is
studying at Hunter College, and is concerned with exploring notions
of home, border, language, translation, memory, loss and violence.
She has been published in an anthology called Breaking
This poem originally appeared in Samar 14: Fall/Winter, 2001
[ http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=57 ]
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