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SHADAB ZEEST HASHMI - POETRY - SPRING 2010 FEATURE  

FEATURE
Eleanor Wilner
"Entering the Labyrinth," an essay on the persona poem.

Eleanor Wilner
Four persona poems: Minos, Ariadne, Daedalus, and The Minotaur.


POETRY

This marks an author's first online publication Michelle Boisseau

This marks an author's first online publication Annie Boutelle
Christine Casson
This marks an author's first online publication Carolyn Creedon
Claudia Emerson
Daisy Fried
Diane Gilliam
Shadab Zeest Hashmi
Kathleen Jesme
Ilya Kaminsky
Marilyn Krysl
David Lee
Gary Copeland Lilley
Maurice Manning
Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Jo Rabins
Tim Seibles
This marks an author's first online publication Heidy Steidlmayer
 
Book Review
"Tourist in Hell" by Eleanor Wilner—Book Review, by David Rigsbee.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Shadab Zeest Hashmi has been the editor of the annual Magee Park Poets Anthology since 2000. Her poems have been included in Nimrod, Hubbub, New Millennium Writings, The Bitter Oleander, Poetry Conspiracy, SDPA, Pakistani Literature, and online in UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry, among other publications. Her book of poems Baker of Tarifa is forthcoming in 2010.


Sorrows of Moraima    


And so she is wed
in her plain mantilla,
the stoic vezir's
sixteen-year old Moraima
to Abu-abdallah, rey el chico.
She has three times as many sorrows as you,
lone cypress with the bent torso!
I watch her burn before she has bloomed.
I, the window they call
the eyes of Ayesha.
I, myself a gaping book waiting to be written,
watch her pace through white corridors,
reading passages between
the hissing walls.
A husband at war, a child taken captive,
all day she digs for a window.
All the while I let in common sparrows,
twigs, pollen, arrows of winter rain,
she is behind deaf carmen walls
in the city below
shut away from this, her palace.
Three times your sorrows, broken cypress.



Notes: Moraima, wife of the last Muslim emperor of Granada (Al Andalus), suffered imprisonment and exile when Spain fell to Castilian rule (1492). The speaker of the poem is a window known as "Ain al Ayesha" or "the eyes of Ayesha" in the Alhamra palace. The window overlooked the city of Albaicin where Moraima was imprisoned.

 

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