Alien

When I was born, Earth held me in her mouth then promptly spat me out.
I saw my first map of the world six years later. I remember the cartographer’s
straight lines through Africa and I wondered if he could be trusted.

My grandmother’s name is Qamaray, which means
shines like the bright side of the moon. My name is the highest of heavens.
Maybe in this is a sign that we are not of this world.
In Somali, the sun has 14 names, maybe I am from the sun’s flames, birthed
under her auburn arches. She transported me on her solar waves and I landed

here. I took human form, and my body is that of Fadumo, the goat herder
in the 990 Hijra drought, with her carefully coiled hair. 17 with a child on her
left breast. In the field is Ahmed, wooden hairbrush in his afro and red macawiis
tied around his narrow hips. She died in 996 with her fourth child taking his first breath
and a white sheet drenched in blood.

Sometimes I feel a bottomless grief in my stomach and I wonder if it is ancient.
Maybe it is Fadumo screaming in me, warning me of what’s to come.
The lingering assault of tribesmen and the Coloniser. Civil war and the
Long Famine. Refugees and HIV. Explosions and
the World’s Face, turned.

Is it a coincidence then, that there is nothing for me in this world
except what I hold in my small hands?
Maybe somewhere

in the silence beyond Jupiter and her herd of moons
beyond the radio-waves transmitted by human desperation
beyond the poking eyes of the telescopes
beyond the warm hand of the Shams
Deep, into where there is only the mythology of the Old World
and the Ear of God
There, in that pocket of dark matter, I

belong. When I was born, my mother says I looked her in the eye
and she saw the whole galaxy
flash back.

________

Fardowsa Mohamed is a poet and medical doctor from Auckland, New Zealand. Her work has appeared in Poetry New Zealand, Sport Magazine, Landfall and others. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry.