Khaled Mattawa: I’m Khaled Mattawa, and this is PoetryNow. I came to the United States when I was about 15. From that time until 2000, I didn’t go back to Libya. Beginning with the 2000s, I began to go home to Libya to visit with family. During the Gaddafi regime, I had to be very low key, and definitely would not want to be in the media, or to be at all in the public eye. I was never touched by the regime, thank God. So it was a tenure of being there but also not being part of anything. The Arab Spring, if you will, began 32 years after I left Libya. That’s what I’ve been waiting for. That’s when the real homecoming began for me. That’s when I began to go back to Libya and be myself.

(READS POEM)

We Are Saying Yes But Who Are We to Say

That silence again
             a wall
of feathers, and near
 
enough
            to block the
circuit of our time—
 
Adobe wall,
           roads of dust—
thirty two years
 
until the bones
            discoursed—
That's how long
 
I've dug into
            myself—
And the baby?
 
She is a promise—
            ungraspable,
mist—
 
Fuss or no fuss,
           yearn, yearn,
yearn. Heart
 
pounds, ears
            throb—
Will it ask
 
the question
            tattooed
on our skin?
 
Until dirt
            fills
my grave, you say.
 
Call it wait
            or rest—the stare,
the lunge back
 
into what we can’t
            swim—
Another shore now—
 
how our arms flail
            the joints’
acidic burn—
 
A hunger     
            unbeknownst
to us, a flame cupped
 
in skin—earth
           turning us
toward a thin stream
 
of self—Oh anticipant,
            Oh dear
loving Lord—to hold
 
a burden like a need
            and let
a new life begin.
 

* * *

Perhaps what’s behind the poem is this idea of the “yes” that Constantine Cavafy talks about in the poem “Che Fece ... Il Gran Refiuto,” where he says that there are people that are prepared to receive the “yes” of life and there are people who are not.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

We are saying yes but who are we to say

* * *

So I’m saying yes, but I’m also wondering, who am I to say yes. Who am I to embrace this life? We are saying yes to one thing—to build a new world and a happier world, a happier nation. But again, who are we to say this? I don’t know. I don’t know what organically ties me to the “yes.” I’m always saying I belong to the yes, but the yes is telling me, no, maybe not, maybe you are not good enough. So I’m always trying to plead my case to the yes of the universe, and the yes of the universe comes and goes in my life.

Katie Klocksin: That was Khaled Mattawa and his poem “We Are Saying Yes But Who Are We to Say.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.