Flawed Landscape
Poems 1987-2008
Sharif S. Elmusa

published 2008 • 8½" x 10½" • 128 pages • full-color photos
ISBN 9781566567138 • hardback • $24.95 •  Read More


A Little Piece of Sky

Marveling today at the Safeway’s abundance
of tuna fish cans,
I thought of my friend Hussein.
He was the genius of the school.
He breathed in history, grammar, math
as easily as the dust of the camp.
He had a pyramid’s core. Books
would’ve sprouted from his head,
but he had to live, and to live he
apprenticed with a carpenter,
and later on flew the skill to an oil country
where he made good as a contractor.

His father had been killed the spring he was born
in a war that made us refugees
and tossed us on the moral map of the world.
His mother was a woman of meager means,
“Could look at a word for a year
and not recognize what it was.”
And so it was:
Poverty wagged him everyday.

One afternoon
I met him walking home from the store
holding, with his thumb and forefinger,
the upright lid of a half-opened
tuna fish can, humming a tune
about holding a little piece of sky.

Copyright (C) 2008 Interlink Publishing. All rights reserved.