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      when you die, Mahmoud

      when your aorta thrashing

      all sluggish and crinkled

      like a purple snake bursts

      because the lines can no longer

      slither the perfect metaphor,

      and your heart as poem spurts

      the final blood

      in that hospital in foreign parts

      of the barbarian land,

      when your heart is at last

      a sundered vowel

      a moon grows above the island

      among scudding clouds

      of this ‘little winter season’

      which soon will spill danker ink

      in long verses over the waves

      so that crows and goats and dirt-poor children

      in song may splash in the madder

      as if celebrating birding

      three, four, five days and nights

      cordage by day, invisible like dying

      or the grope surfacing stitch by stitch in a stanza

      to unbind darkness

      when time has its tidal time as reaper

      with the fields of the body

      until the veiled fleece fades

      to shrouded likeliness

      and schedules over the nacre land

      fall away like rags of rotting flesh

      and the mandolin moon bloats virginally full

      a sloop of bone

      your skull, Mahmoud