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Documentary of a Lost Map I did not know the world could be broken when none of its parts has a spare sleep brings forth everything I owned memory of the day we left home unpacked the house pillars quivered before they got torched my friends became ghosts even before they got pierced by bullets I waved and they did not wave back I knew something was wrong the world was revolving anticlockwise or it could be safe to say the world was moving round a clock that had stopped working there is a woman outside the house she wants to follow us out of the burning city she does not remember the route to her old house after she fell in love with the tattoo on a man’s forehead today that man lost his head a picture of her missing daughter hangs down her neck like a talisman she hugged herself when father told her the lines on her palms are too faded to be traced as would anyone hoping to embrace the solvency of a blurry childhood I own the memory of this woman like a toy that meant nothing when it got broken even though I have tried but failed to fix it because none of the parts would fit where it fell Hussain Ahmed 10
page 11
Beijing Parakeets Returning again to this hutong hotel I come in from the frost, remove my mask, hand over my passport and order a beer. Check-in will be fifteen minutes, sir. I step out into the courtyard, towards the small sad pond, winter water on the verge of growing its bones, the slow creak of rusted and muttering carp. I’ve already got a pollution headache but I wait beneath the bare pomegranate tree and watch the two old parakeets, lovebirds, huddled up together, one cleaning the feathers on the other’s head, the other softly singing. They’ve been here every time I’ve stayed. I’ve seen receptionists sneaking them breakfast-scraps of mango, and watched tourists smuggling pomegranates’ meaty red seeds between their bars like rubies. I sip my beer, the birds softly sing, their little lungs inflating, deflating, the smog of Beijing simmering around us. Like this, like this, we go on living, through the cold and the smog, through Spring Festival’s firecrackers, we go on, they go on, singing querulous songs: O fire lantern, you are floating through the gathering thunderheads. David Tait 11

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Beijing Parakeets

Returning again to this hutong hotel I come in from the frost, remove my mask, hand over my passport and order a beer. Check-in will be fifteen minutes, sir.

I step out into the courtyard, towards the small sad pond, winter water on the verge of growing its bones, the slow creak of rusted and muttering carp.

I’ve already got a pollution headache but I wait beneath the bare pomegranate tree and watch the two old parakeets, lovebirds, huddled up together, one cleaning the feathers on the other’s head, the other softly singing.

They’ve been here every time I’ve stayed. I’ve seen receptionists sneaking them breakfast-scraps of mango, and watched tourists smuggling pomegranates’ meaty red seeds between their bars like rubies.

I sip my beer, the birds softly sing, their little lungs inflating, deflating, the smog of Beijing simmering around us.

Like this, like this, we go on living, through the cold and the smog, through Spring Festival’s firecrackers, we go on, they go on, singing querulous songs:

O fire lantern, you are floating through the gathering thunderheads.

David Tait

11

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