For Theo

“It is not enough // to say love in Arabic. / You must say // be the thing that buries me.” — Hala Alyan

All the time as a kid, I mixed up
the Arabic words for poem and hair. Words for
head and rice. My son and
cheese. There is no easy way to make these mistakes
believable in this artless daylight. Most mornings, you wake up
and ask if it’s nighttime for someone else. I remember
the father in Gaza, swaddling his son before
the bombing begins, having carefully written
a name on each of his baby’s limbs
while I carry you downstairs, whole, squirming with life.
I return to an earlier draft of this poem, one I began
the day I learned you were coming, thinking
I had so much to say when
how badly I just wanted that poem to protect you. How
could it? I start over. You wake another morning
and don’t eat the eggs you requested. I wrestle you dressed and drive
us to school. We count the stoplights in Arabic. Wahad, you begin.
Tanain. Batata. The mistake is sweet on our tongues,
but I let fear back in. So many nights,
I would wait for the anthill of your chest
to rise just one more time. You wake
again, and I’m mourning because oh mercy,
all I have, this voice I meant to pass you like a baton
but instead fumble around the house. Would you love
an apple? I say everything twice.
What color are your eyes? For God’s sake,
take the medicine or I’ll die. It isn’t enough
to be buried by you in the end so I ask you
to bury me endlessly. Over the milk in the medicine
dropper you can barely swallow with the ulcers in your throat,
the shit you stain on my shirt, and the fever
I pray all night will break, may you bury me.
When the doctors first pressed you
against my chest, your warmth was a map home
burning in my hands faster than I could 
learn its landscape. This glut and guilt of another morning
when you wake and someone you resemble
does not. All I have left in 
this world is a word for burial
which does not belong only to death
but the love in my heart, our inheritance of even more
light. I want to see you live
everyday.