Starlet

By Medina Tenour Whiteman

My mother had only stepped out for a minute

– fractious baby with sparkling ear studs

cropped black curls large ebony eyes

straddling her hip –

so we could watch the slideshow

in peace

concentrate our grownup

fact-absorbing minds on the disaster

blossoming like a red camellia

roots in Syria but petal tips

folding out over Turkey, the Mediterranean

and now Granada

recounted by a man who lost half his leg

when a missile hit his house

during dinner in Aleppo

 

We shudder and tut at

tent-and-barbed-wire horizons

grubby grinning snaggle-toothed kids

in a camp bulldozed a year ago

its starlet, born there, now

illuminating an Andalusian street

her points of origin razed twice

 

I slip outside the screening

to check on my daughter                                                                                                                              

and this baby’s mother comes too

umbilical pull still strong

but neither are anywhere to be seen

 

I pace the street calling

she shadows me

her eyes colouring

breath accelerating

and we start to run up and down the hill

me calling “Mu-u-u-um!”

like an affronted teenager

until at last they appear

the baby gnawing on a breadstick

which, seeing tiny teeth, my mum

had gone to the bakery to buy

and this 19-year-old Syrian mother

breaks

 

I wrap my arms around her

habibti

wishing so many habibtis

had found their lost babies

strolling casually round the corner

on a strange grandmother’s hip

chewing a stick of bread

 

We laugh as though it were                                                                                                      

something trivial

as though it’s silly to cry

at intimations of grief

when it’s threaded

through all the warps

and if one day you pull on it

the whole thing

puckers

 

Medina Tenour Whiteman is the author of three books, the travelogue-memoir The Invisible Muslim:  Journeys Through Whiteness and Islam (Hurst, 2020), Huma’s Travel Guide to Islamic Spain (Huma Press, 2016), and the collection of poetry Love is a Traveller and We Are its Path (Ecstatic Exchange, 2016; 2nd edition Mzungu Press 2018). She lives near Granada with her family.