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Election Day by Omar Sakr

Election Day

Omar Sakr

Spring 2015

Savour the day, there is no more important a message

than that. Suck its marrow out, swirl it on your tongue,

the sweetness of the calm, the stillness. Even the dawn

is slowed, it seems. This is the day the spin stops.

These few hours are all you’ll have to find your feet,

to lose your swaying sea legs, so used are we

to constantly being tossed on the heaving blue-tied back

of politics. That morning, let the bitter aroma of Arabica beans

flood your nose, mouth, throat. Anticipate the heat

to come. Water the flowers before you forget

and everything is reset to the blur, dying coral reefs

and hirsute miners in fluro vests digging up bodies,

refugees mired in valuable rock. Men kissing men

and ministers making illicit money (and also kissing men)

and hysteria everywhere, hijabs and halal kangaroos,

child abuse covered up here, here, and here, recurring

beneath so many creeds and colours you can make out

a horrible rainbow, a mirage slick-sheened on oil spills

drowning the ocean. Just water the damn flowers

is what I’m saying, and walk down to the local town hall

or public school, lose yourself in the eruption of languages,

the bright-winged battle of parakeets and magpies above,

and do your best to slip past the pitched tents of war;

anything immovable in this uncertainty is not to be

trusted. Go past the sunny child holding up his parents’

placard—the bliss of his ignorance an incandescence,

unaware his future isn’t girt by sea, but consumed by it—

and there, in the echoing hush, the rustle of paper

and muted coughs, cast your voice into the void. Fate

will do with it what it wills, and as you exit back into

the real world, already beginning to whirl once more,

individual faces merging into a stream of almost-familiarity

and the sound of engines gunning through music, brace

yourself for the hurtling motion of upturned earth, to hear

your future announced in monotone drones on the TV

as you prepare for sleep—brace hard for the impact

of everything changing, and nothing at all.

 

Omar Sakr is an Arab-Australian poet. Published in English, Arabic and Spanish, his poetry is featured in national and international journals.

Click here to read our recent interview with Omar Sakr.

 

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