Announcing We Outlast Empire: a recurring series
In his essay “The First White President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump.”
And being an American tragedy, it will not only affect Americans. It has not only affected Americans. This tragedy concerns the hegemonic systems built by empires. This tragedy concerns the voices across the globe lost to unnamed and unaddressed imperialism.
We want to ask a question once posed last century, a question as pressing today: what are poets for in destitute times?
We find it imperative to provide a platform for the voices who grapple with this question. For the next few months, we will be hosting poems that dive into the heart of what it means to live, write, and resist in this chapter of history; poems that explore the many angles of our current global and political situation. With words, we hope, we may transmute a part of ourselves—a part however small or large—that can exist without drawn borders, without violence, without injustice.
The many voices in this series refuse complicity and draw their own borders. We’re honored to now introduce Anwer Ghani’s series of poems, “Trump and the Fairies.”
Trump and the Fairies
I am sure that you know everything about fairies even what they dress at the morning. From their windows they have raised their tails and swing their colorful ends with delight. They are unlike me always in happiness, and always seeking the cold water, but I am a corner of destruction where this world hangs my soul on a flaming corn deeply in the seventh underneath. I will try to ask Trump to discover my bad magic to end the life’s runaway. And by the way I will ask him to give me a little of fairies’ feather to light my dark days.
Trump and My Dreamland
Mr. Trump, the president of USA, was born in Queen, my dreamland where there were broken lights and celestial creatures standing as a lover’s heart with yearning and smile. In that atoll you may find your essence and our grandfathers’ silvery taproot. The shore is neither faintly blue nor erratic in its waving. It is always quiet and lovely, but I can’t see my absent childhood in its mirrors. I am the war’s son emerging from its charred fissures as a bitter shadow. In that atoll which the immigrants told me about, there was a tent of gorgeous warmth. “You can’t find like this hug outside, even in your earth” he said. In the same way by which this island steals the hearts, she stole my soul which equals nothing in this boaster world. I am not a dreamer man but when I see the awesomeness I remember my obligatory sadness and unfair floppiness.
Trump and the Magic Garden
They said that a treasure was resided in the biggest whale’s stomach. Of course, it is neither in Alhilla’s river nor in the mud of The Mother’s Garden. I need a huge number of light years to reach the periphery of its orchard. They also said that it was hidden in that magic garden and exactly under the brown tree. We don’t know the exact place, but I am sure that the Trump’s CIA knows, because they know everything even what I wear in the breezy afternoon. I am also sure that the treasure’s jewelries as well as our oils are now under his hands, not because he had stood under the rain or he had used his spade, but because the Trump, as we know and in a simple word, is the president of USA.
In order to effectively outlast empire, new poetry will be featured every Wednesday on our online platform. If you would like your poem to be part of this series, please email mina@apogeejournal.org
