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Anis Shivani's poem in this issue is from the collection, Treasonous Times, which is available to interested publishers. Other poems from it appear in The Times Literary Supplement, The Iowa Review, Meanjin, Wasafiri, The Hollins Critic, Denver Quarterly, Confrontation, and elsewhere. A novel, The Informant, and a new collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, are in progress. |
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Published Spring 2006
 
The Jihadist Sonneteer
a.
Milk of paradise, spilled fresh at mother's
cold feet, anti-Crusade cannons silent
in Isfahan and Bukhara, we strident
few, led by the dead amongst the brothers,
march on Western capitals defended
by missile systems and computized pain,
with lust slain, hearts free of money's stain,
and knees always to the Ka'aba bended.
If innocents want recompense, pray
they may submit to the rule of one God.
We are absolved of guilt, while the CIA
gives Mubarak and Musharraf the nod.
The Holy Books justify the revolt today,
as harshly as Jefferson's tirades abroad.
b.
Sanctuary, they say of pashtunwali,
applies to guests not only of ghostly bent,
but to those as well who their names once lent
to the pitch-dark Fateh Ali qawwali
known as the clash of civilizations.
We read Fukuyama and Huntington,
we read the signs of the fiery curtain
falling on the earth's pagan magicians.
Obesity of the mind is the new
affliction in dar-al-harb, and here too.
Among the disciples there were few
who sold guns for butter, or who now do.
The prophets all tasted the toxic brew
of imitation texts, like me, like you.
c.
When a girl blows up her skinny ten-year-
old limbs in a Tel Aviv café, crimes
ignored by the International Court's mimes
and mimics get clarified, made again dear.
When an Iranian boy in the trenches
becomes shaheed, it flatters the noisy
backbenches of shaitans from Boise
to Fargo, till their guilt it rewrenches.
I had a child once, fragrant as the moon
on a placid Karbala night, aboveboard.
I saw it at the head of the middle swoon
induced by free spending of myths we hoard.
Its death by fire was to me angelic boon,
and forever after I walked as my own lord.
d.
It's one-way traffic, the spruce and pine
of Jalalabad buried by strafe and strife,
the old water-carrier with one-eyed wife
one of the walking dead, human land-mine
planted by our own traitors. Minds explode
at misreadings of ayats, tonal errors
in qirat and hifz, unchanneled terrors
melting the glacier of calm by overload.
All the Kalashnikovs and AK-47s sold
for platters of naan and gosht won't put
the genie back where it came from, so old
is this march to victory, so ruined, so moot
as to conclusion, that all the vaults of gold
in the world can be squished by a lame boot.
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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