Spring 2010 - The Silhouette Literary and Art Magazine - emcvt

Fiction Editor’s Choice
The Loving Reader
Zaki Barzinji
Thoughts from Zaki
“This piece was born out of complete frustration with my inability to say
anything of meaning. I was on a plane home from Cairo (where I spent a
semester) and trying to get back into the swing of writing for the coming
semester of English courses. I felt (and still often feel) this unshakeable feeling
that to truly succeed as a writer, there is this tremendous pressure to say
something profound, witty, out of this world, just dripping with brilliance
with every word. I couldn’t take it. I wrote the first lines of this poem, then
wrote “I can never think how to begin/So caught am I in this race for wit/
Twist some new cliché and polish/ Shiny new bowl for the same old shit”. As I
threw my head back in exasperation, with babies crying left and right, choppy
shouted Arabic pelting my ears, and Hannah Montana playing on the tiny
screens before me, I shut my eyes to escape this strange, squawking, stupid, and
brilliant world called language. And then –cliché alert- all I saw was the face
of the most beautiful woman I had just met in pyramid land… and it wrote
itself. That’s it, and that’s me.
“
How do you put feelings to words?
Squeeze letters out of sunshine?
Can seas of black ink ever begin to cover
The blinding rainbow of joy that courses through life’s pen?
So why try?
Why reduce the infinite prism of the universe
To the mere cracks of language?
You may scribe a thousand delicious words,
But paper shall forever have but one taste.
A single scent.
Fill it with every last wondrous sound rattling in the mind’s ear,
And all it will ever sing is the gentle whip of a rustle.
So. Then.
You will be my language.
Your eyes my adjectives, for lost in them do I see the world described.
The sway of your hips, my cadence and meter.
Moans and murmurs, my onomatopoeias and colloquialisms.
And your voice... the quill, your heavenly song... the ink.
The only calligraphy I ever want etched on my soul’s parchment.
I only want to speak you,
To turn each of your pages,
Love every crinkle, smudge, rip, and tear,
Because they mean
You are.
A pristine book whose spine has never been cracked,
Just another done-up, pretty cover,
Is not worth a single glance,
From the loving reader.
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