The Youngest of the Graeae
–Agha Shahid Ali

Listen to my account as the world vanishes:
we were young, my sisters and I,
though withered from birth, our hair gray,
in this land of wavering light,
everything shrouded, the sun banished, the moon in exile.

We had the shapes of swans but we had arms,
under our wings of watered silk
our hands ready to take over
the twilight each time one finished
her ration of sight.

It now is mine, this twilight all mine:
my sisters are dead, and I alone am left
to see these trees, these forests, this ebony ocean.

There were times I would have run away
but Sisters, your dreamless faces stopped me,
the blue smoke rising from your sockets.

And what would have been out there in the world?
Only cages and torturing hands,
someone stitching our eye as a trophy
to a screen speckled with mirrors.

sisters, when I lie
as we did, with my body in the ocean,
my hair thrown like gray waves upon the sand,
I remember what we betrayed
for this twilight.

And I weep on the necks of trees,
praying,

O God of Light,
before I end this life,
lower your hands into the east
and bring up the sun, once.