An Elegy for My Clandestine Cousin
On the brink of the end of the world,
the strange chill of summer seeps into the bones on a miserable Vermont evening,
beneath the weight of an absence suspended in time.
Fog hangs over the windows of Shingle Cottage,
burdened by the memory of Frost, Auden, and Roethke.
Poets who knew that sorrow could become a language
and that death is a closed door, no matter how poetically we speak before it.
We are bewildered by memories whose realities we can no longer acknowledge.
We turn desperately to old photos whose edges have been eaten away by the years.
Some contain faces once familiar to us,
though we have not yet decided whether to add them to the hundreds we destroyed in our attempt to assassinate a past
whose meanings we can no longer bear.
Yet ours is a time in which absence deepens the more we try to forget.
In one of the surviving photographs, I still see you, Hassan, asleep in my room.
Your small body is folded into tranquility, your hands closed around a copy of the Quran held tightly against your chest.
You do not resemble a sleeping child, but rather a young man preparing to leave.
I imagine that I can enter the photo, kneel beside you, and reach out my hand to wake you.
But you do not wake.
You hold the Quran close to your chest, clinging to it as though you have heard, from far away,
a call that the laments of clandestine exile cannot hear,
A call that even the poets of Shingle Cottage will never understand,
despite all the poems and elegies, they left behind.
Author’s note: Written July 31, 2026 — Bennington College, Vermont
The day my cousin Hassan’s body arrived in his hometown of Gabès, Tunisia for burial, following his death in France as an undocumented immigrant.
Nizar F. Hermes is a polyglot scholar, poet, and translator of North African origin. His Arabic poetry has appeared in leading cultural venues across the MENA region, including Al-Majallah al-Thaqāfiyyah al-Jazāʾiriyyah (The Cultural Magazine of Algeria), Al-Muthaqqaf (The Intellectual), Majallat Anhār al-Adabiyyah (Anhar Literary Magazine) Dīwān al-ʿArab: Online Pulpit of Culture, Thought, and Literature, Awtār: Magazine of Culture and Literature, Azzaman Newspaper, Intelligentsia for Culture and Free Thought. His English poems have been featured in Spillwords, Transverse, Inner Weather and are forthcoming in others. He is currently preparing a poetry collection titled A Blitz on the Territories of Amnesia, or Very Exiled Thoughts. https://mesalc.as.virginia.edu/nizar-f-hermes
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