Published on 10 July 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915108-14-2
All profits from this book will be given to Young Minds, a mental health charity for children, young people and their parents, which makes sure young people can get the mental health support they need.
https://www.youngminds.org.uk/
Sodom
Her father said she was the way she was
because of where they had ended up. Told her
she had simply soaked me through her pores.
Banned her from the garden where fresh grapes hung,
her feet upon them as though a monster bathed within.
She had crushed them past pulp, wiped the oil down her arms.
Her father’s prophet spoke of two women grinding grain,
bed-fellows, one taken and the other left behind.
He searched the books and found it. Come again?
These are the words of the prophet who also spoke
of vultures who have nowhere to gather. I find her
in pieces, her bitter carcass on my tongue making room.
I grip the bed frame, its structure there to give me meaning.
I touch the saucepan, my home’s deeds. I see bricks fall
from the sky, if you believe me. It could be true.
This could be anywhere, vultures parading the street,
looking for a sin to punish. They set fire to cars,
take swords to the heads of our men that don’t join in.
I am scared of what comes next. I hear the voice from heaven
appear on my arms, scrawl a word there and I know its meaning
before it has even come into being. Come again?
The air is dry as androgyny. The winds septentrional guests.
I see their backs as they leave me behind. The prophet said
it’s the generation left behind that speaks wisdom most clearly.
Lightning creaks the sky in the day, she turns back to look.
I keep her myth as saucepan swirls. There will be children
who hate us, not ours, rather generations far down the line.
*
Shereen Akhtar’s tragic death in October 2023 means that this book of poetry will be her first and last full collection. Anyone reading it will immediately sense what a loss that is, but also what a gift she has passed on. Shereen was a lesbian, a Muslim, a human rights lawyer, and had a passionate interest in environmental issues – all of which inform her work. Relationships, including one with a female Jewish rabbi, are dissected fearlessly and compassionately. She never shirks from complexity when grappling with spirituality, mortality and religion. Many poems in the opening section are set in Israel and Palestine and unpick the oppressions and contradictions there. It’s rare that you’ll find language used with such economy, dynamism and intelligence, in ways that also pierce the heart.
Complex, melancholic, and sensual, the late Shereen Akhtar’s Rabbi / Robin is at a continuous crossroads of reckoning with queer, interfaith love, addiction and channeling “the expansion of this mysterious darkness and light,” in which the speaker invites us to “kiss the calligraphy/ on her skin too holy to touch. The words burn. The words are moot.” But Akhtar’s words themselves ask the reader to give so much more of themselves, to consider and make real a world beyond geopolitical boundaries and intuitional divides, to speak up and out even when “some nights one should be silent, but that, my love, was a lie.” Rabbi / Robin reimagines torn, weary landscapes with equal scrutiny and generosity where "there's a party on the moon" but also "the day of revelation" in which "the Swans ask me questions/with such love I give them answers." Imaginative as it is confrontational, and full of candid curiosity, Rabbi / Robin is about euphoric flight into the beyond and meditative trajectories that return us here, to right now, these troubling times in which “we even hold our patchwork souls/ tight behind our teeth, firm in the cheeks.”
—Rosebud Ben-Oni
