Interview with My
Father: Names
Ruth Awad
When someone dies in Tripoli, we write their names on paper
next to their pictures and post them where others can see.
66
Walk the street where the names wave from the walls,
flutter from windows, buildings gilled with sheets—
breathing paper, beating paper, the streets are paper—
and we don’t know who we’re going to see, whose face
will call from that collage, the hundreds of eyes glancing
all around, as though we could lift them from the pages,
as though we weren’t born into war, too,
as though our religion (blood-bright
in the hands of a checkpoint guard, a flapping wing of paper)
won’t tack us among them—the razed, their names, white light.