“Nights” appeared in Mona Kareem’s debut poetry collection, Mornings Washed by Thirst’s Water (Qurtas, 2002), published when she was just fourteen years old. Written in numbered fragments, this lyric poem engages the surreal as it maps out night after night (dream after dream?), all filled with the agony of uncertainty, and, perhaps, of the imminence of death.
The theme of death pervades Mona Kareem’s oeuvre, her earlier work no exception. In one of our many conversations about her writing, Mona recalls that as a young writer, she took pleasure in incorporating death as a character in her poems. “Death was the property of adults,” she tells me. “And I was always tempted to trespass into these core human experiences that I associated only with grown-ups.”
In my translation of “Nights,” I deviated from the poem’s original fluid form, and instead arranged the text in couplets. Possibly driving my decision was my realization of, and appreciation for, the “call and response” texture of the poem, which I believed couplets would accentuate.
What makes Mona’s use of what I have decided to name the “call and response” composition here particularly effective, and moving, is that the sentences she places within a single numbered night do not produce rational progressions; instead, they create undeniable emotional echoes. In my favorite fragment, “4,” the two sentences that Mona had originally linked with the word “and,” and which I have instead separated into even-sized couplets to create a sense of parity, do not immediately appear to correlate:
The rain saves my father
the hassle of painting the front door.Donating my organs to the cats
doesn’t make me a bird.
But in my reading, I found an echo of futility within this poignant, visually striking “call and response.” The rain assaults the front door, rendering the father’s plans to paint it superfluous, and decay inevitable. Meanwhile, despite feeding her organs to the cats, the speaker will not metamorphose into a bird; she will remain human, defenseless in the face of an incessant reel of nights.
Sara Elkamel (she/her) is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, Egypt, and New York City. She earned an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel's poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, the Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry London, Poet Lore, Best New Poets ...