Three Poems by Mina Gorji
Thaw
At what point
does a life
held in ice
begin to cease?
*
A woodsman
carrying a heart
(still warm)
out of the forest.
*
I am standing
at the forest edge –
where foxgloves
will appear.
Ground is hard,
white with frost.
Auguries
Some days we turn our faces to the skies,
looking for something, for a sign,
and see a crow disguised
as its own shadow
disappear
into a hungry line.
Or pale grey clouds
blown in from somewhere else
darken to forms –
perhaps a lion,
or a citadel of nimbus,
empty, almost
luminous.
Tinnitus in Nineveh
The library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh
held many remedies:
if the hands of a ghost seize on a man,
and his ears sing or whisper
stuff them with charms,
fumigate with rue or frankincense,
find a blacksmith or a poet
to distract the gnat
with clang
of metal
striking
metal,
chisel
striking
stone.
Mina Gorji was born in Iran and lives in Cambridge, where she is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a mother of two young daughters. Her first collection, art of escape (Carcanet), was published in 2020. Her work has also appeared in a number of magazines, including Poetry Review, PN Review, Magma, bath magg, London Magazine, and in Bloodaxe's Staying Alive and The Forward Prize Anthology 2020. Her second collection, Scale, will be published by Carcanet in July 2022.