Amy Lowell Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Mary Buchinger
Nile Delta: Mattocks
“I behold their industry and they are giants.”
Walcott, “The Bounty”
Salt from the earth and salt from the brow,
Bleaching the marl of oily Nile earth. These men,
Like shadows fixed from tombs, indurated spectres,
Bas-reliefed in the shimmering, heated light in
Which I saw them, their haunches toward me,
Lifting the ancient grub hoes, cutting the soil,
This Damiettan earth offering itself again, again,
And forever, to the blade, like a hungering lam’s throat,
The parting of the flesh of it, the earth-watering blood,
To bring forth the harvest, reap the manna within.
Those blades. These gleaming, earth-burnished, flashing
Blades, thousands, along the Delta, bent-backed toilers,
Soil-struck, lifting them, up and down, forward,
Row-ty-row, like the long, rachitic hafts of oil
Rigs, pumping, wheezing in phthisic toil,
Lunging, plunging, heat-breathing lungs, striking
And lifting, the striking and lifting blades
In their apogee, caught in the Egyptian sun,
A field of blinking, blazing stars, like a timbal,
Tinkling in the eye, muscle and stroke, this legion,
Lifting, breaking the flesh loam, a thousand times a day,
A million times of years, these dark Pharaonic fields.
I sat in the choking anvil-heat of a passenger train
Bound for Cairo, stalled on a side track: waiting.
Watching the sun-luster on those sun-burnt blades,
And I thought this is the prayer we on earth utter.
This eternal return to the friable soil of our lives.
The one supplication shared by all. Painful worship.
Hagop Missak Merjian has been a teacher all his life and spent years teaching in Cairo, Egypt, and Thessaloniki, Greece. He writes: “I have a large collection of poetry/memoir and hope to enjoin a publisher—soon—for I am old. But not to worry, Aeschilleus was 89 when he wrote some of his most poignant dramas.”