Poetry by Abdul-Jaleel Abdalla

​Learning Language
 
the arab elders would teach me
their language at night,
around the campfires
so I could hear the distinct crackle
of each word.




The Tracks
 
the last worker scrunched up the stars into stones
          to warm the tracks when no wheels would again.
now they recall the vibrations, the crushing
          of rust and steel, under ancient memory lines
haggard with old straggles of electricity.
 
          here flowers are the organs which secrete
a murky stillness. the weeds copulate
          into cannibal mosaics between sunken planks.
from leafless trees the sulphur of echoes
          veins out like cloudy roots.
not even birds nest in the abandoned buildings
          by this gutted stream of thoughts
aged into iron. only fog waiting, city-bound,
          in her blue coat of whispers.
only bricks which chase the rails
          have memorised the empathy and shape of footsteps.
 
perhaps others have wondered
          about its time graffitied bones
and have come to lower their heads
          at this un-glassed oddity.
maybe youth who have drifted
          too many times into past worlds.
who now must visit dead places
          to be free. who cripple their names
upon beams tiger striped with rust,
          as if it were their own creation.
         
crouching in black hoodies
          they sweep myths tattooed
upon coal for poetry.
          dusk crackles beneath their boots
as they trace rust’s hieroglyphic breath;
          looking back to angels melodic
with sleeplessness. their nails of wet feather
          thickening the sky with scars.
watching these children they throw
          their prayers like tomahawks to god.
their wings of black knives shudder
          as the children upheave the railroads
of their minds.
 
          the ancient arch of this urban tundra
creaks with misty sorrows:
          these lonely pharaohs of its tracks’ golden encryptions,
eyes swallowing the fading lozenge of a linoleum sun,
          crumple home’s violent sounds
into the tin can of silence.
 
          through the moon’s beams of thick cream
the children spy a gashed colossus
          upon these bedraggled rails.
sculpted from mist she echoes
          time’s murder of lives past
when this place once flickered with flames
          of human figure.
 
now the shadows charred upon her throat peel
          like waves filled with harsh stories
and fall to the tracks in drops of rust,
          as her figure too abandons this place,
and these children seep back into the hollow lunar
          of a hermetic city.
 
while the tracks’ glands of rusted mythology
          wait nocturnal upon a sculpted field
for its dancing beasts to crush time’s welted cloves.
          to feel those freights capsuling a million lives
flying along its golden palmistry,
          as the night sky ties up
its bandana of stars
          once again.

Bio: Abdul-Jaleel Abdalla is an Australian/Palestinian poet currently based in South Australia. His work has been published in Bareknuckle Poet's second anthology, Deep Water Literary Journal, NoiseMedium, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Alwasat Newspaper.

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