In Serjilla

Calling the River in Raqqa

Hughes might have recognized it when told there would be fish in Raqqa from the Forah, name foreign as the landscape, flat sand giving way to riparian richness, stray weeds sprung into trees along the river whose local name means nothing to ears accustomed to English, where hard consonants dominate and syllables mark diphthongs elongating appellation as if its waters could be made to reach further back than to a Negro Speaking of Rivers bathing in its young dawn, the Arabic like a nickname, shortened by familiarity and knowing its flow, where it changed course and civilizations the Turkish excavators half appropriate in the present and the past when Harun al-Rashid built against Baghdad’s heat through one city gate remaining and leading to the Palace of Maidens, once heated by pipes pumping water warmed for winter, cylindrical clay in mortared brick ruins fenced near the river where fishermen, like poets, cast lines time after time.