Poetry: “Again, I Am Remembering the Average Life Span of a Housefly is Fifteen to Thirty Days” by Youssef Mohamed
The first lines of Youssef Mohamed’s poem published here represent a kind of challenge, or perhaps a threat. For those of us participating in the Sealey Challenge, reading a book of poems each day during this August, we can certainly understand this professor’s warning: “The first day of class the professor sleazed in / fifteen minutes late and said, Even if you finish / a book a day for the rest of your life, you’ll still die / without having read everything you love.” Even though this line is ugly from an emotional standpoint, Mohamed turns it into something beautiful by the end of his poem, bringing us into an almost magical space as we appreciate not only the poetry he loves, but his poem itself, and finally, the appreciation of poetry itself, the poetry we love to experience, express, share with others, and that with which we find joy.
Again, I Am Remembering the Average Life Span of a Housefly is Fifteen to Thirty Days
The first day of class the professor sleazed in
fifteen minutes late and said, Even if you finish
a book a day for the rest of your life, you’ll still die
fifteen minutes late and said, Even if you finish
a book a day for the rest of your life, you’ll still die
without having read everything you love.
I have since avoided the topic like an ex-lover.
I have since marveled at cows and their lumpish
restraint when everything on which they stand
and sleep is food. This morning I opened the kitchen
window, discovered crows squalling over the insides
of the squirrel for whom I meant to leave out bread.
Again, I am remembering the average life span
of a housefly is fifteen to thirty days.
Even the planets are humble in their celestial ways,
sticking to itineraries gravity-grasped, mindful
not to perturb the neighbors’ rotational machinations.
To this my only rebellion is a language irresponsible
and sprawling. Every Sunday I take the orange line
across town with solely a bag of the necessities.
Where the nearby park cedes to river I commemorate
poems onto scraps of birthday cards, fit them into
aluminum foil schooners. I see them off – humble
sailors voyaging beside kayaks and river cruises;
raising hooks like antennas to heaven, fishermen
catch the city’s brisk half-formed words; these boats
captained by images and pauses clamor toward,
into, out the harbor’s mouth like a split yolk
bleeding into the whole. Of this elegy I have written
and torn up hundreds of drafts. Each gets so long
the sky kneels down to ask me, Silly boy, why
do you think you can hold all of this on your own?
Youssef Mohamed
Youssef Mohamed is a Muslim-American poet and lawyer. His poems have been featured in Hayden's Ferry Review, New South Journal, Ambit Magazine, Nimrod Journal, and elsewhere. He also was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. He has served as a judicial law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. When not writing poems or drowning in judicial opinions, he stress drinks caffeinated beverages and binge watches seasonal anime.
