Every Time I Visit

Omar Sakr

My grandmother retells the night
and the morning of her son my father
dying. He read the Quran and cried.
He left the couch for bed. Turning
in place, like her, he rarely slept.
He was alive at midnight, alive
at one, and two, and three.
For an hour she stopped checking
her boy, yoked rest. She woke
and looked again. He was always
moving her pride her joy
from this country to his birth
country—as much man as zephyr
nothing ever pinned him down—yet now
he cupped his own cheek, he held himself still.