Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American, physician, member of Doctors Without Borders. His poetry and translation have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, The Nation, among others and also in several anthologies. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s most recent poetry is collected in The Butterfly’s Burden from Copper Canyon Press.

Fady Joudah's first book, The Earth in the Attic was chosen for the Yale Series for Younger Poets for 2007 from Judge Louise Gluck.Marilyn Hacker calls him a " brilliant bilingual poet."

LOVE POEM

Say I found you and god
On the same day at the border
Of words, better two late birds than

The stone that hit them.
Say the stone is my death, when we met,
You and I, near the cross

Of the iv pole and fell
In love with the other
Side of the hammer,

The one for removing nails.
Say you will hold me tightly.
Say the pharaoh’s daughter

Wanted to play mother,
So the pharaoh tested the divine
With an ember near

The suckling mouth.
Say Moses lisped his promise.
And termites chewed

On Solomon’s stick
Until they broke his last repose.
And that you were born in tents

Not made of camel or goat hair,
And our wedding car
Is a Red Cross

Ambulance heading to the border,
And in the new country,
Say the hoopoe will still reach us,

Say anything that doesn’t wake me
From my morning sleep,
My dreams take too long

And I must finish them.

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