And finally, before my brain collapses, here's what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to write a poem about rakiya in the style of my own book Unknown Translations:
Rakia: A Translation
It starts, they say, with the first fruit
on the far side of the valley,
where vines twist into language
and the sky pulls at its seams.
Rakia,
thick as a laugh shared in the dark,
it slips from the bottle like a long breath
held too long,
and burns with the promise of forgetting.
I watch as they pour it,
clear as the first line of a poem
you’d never write,
the golden light caught in the glass
shimmers with the quiet scandal
of things unsaid.
One sip,
a sudden leap into the afternoon's gravity,
where thoughts bend like branches,
too heavy to hold in your hand,
and your tongue thickens with something
close to truth,
but not quite.
"To the mountains," they toast,
hands low, steady
like the rise of dusk,
like the curve of a road that doesn’t quite
meet the horizon.
They speak of home,
of ancestors,
of rivers swallowed in one gulp,
as if the words too might dissolve
under the weight of the drink.
But here,
between laughter and the haze
of forgetting the last word,
the land becomes something else.
What were you holding onto?
Nothing.
You hold nothing now,
just the pulse of fire,
the quiet hum that runs through
the veins of anyone willing to listen
close enough.
Another sip,
and the names start to lose their shape,
the drink a language
too old to be remembered,
but never quite forgotten.
No comments:
Post a Comment