A Braid of Garlic: Marilyn Hacker's Homage to Mahmood Darwish

In the Guardian newspaper, a review of Hacker’s new book Names (WW Norton, 2010) that also reproduces her excellent and moving poem in honor of Mahmood Darwish as the paper’s “Poem of the Week.” Check it all out here. Below, the opening stanzas of the poem:

A Braid of Garlic

Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?

What but loss comes round with the changing season?
He is dead, whom, daring, I called a brother
with that leftover life perched on his shoulder
cawing departure.

He made one last roll of the dice. He met his
last, best interlocutor days before he
lay down for the surgery that might/might not
extend the gamble.

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