I would like to tell the boy to look us in the eye, the cameramancan do nothing with this angle, that what’s left is just moreof the rubble of home he’s sitting on like the kingof a demolished kingdom. Around him, sheets of metal coilunder the objects they once sheltered: desk legs, window frames,still half-open, and the innards of concrete, steel nets pokingfrom the sand, catching only wind. His knuckles restbetween mouth and nose in a classic thinker’s pose,while the other hand is poised on his hip, fingers bent backby an invisible bully. If only he had a treasure hiddenbehind him, some relic he could offer us now. We don’t wantto see that other child at the edge of the frame, or his fist;instead, we’re waiting for the boy to square his gazeand ask again, who’s going to teach me now? or hold uphis wrists to the camera, and cry mercy, mercy.
Picture of a Boy, Looking Away (Gaza, 2015)
after an image of twelve-year-old Abdulrahman, seated on the rubbleof his home where his father (who was also his teacher) was killed by a bomb
Feature Date
- January 19, 2024
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Picture of Boy, Looking Away (Gaza, 2015)” from THE WRONG PERSON TO ASK: by Marjorie Lotfi.
Published by Bloodaxe Books on October 19, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Marjorie Lotfi.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Marjorie Lotfi is the author of The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). The winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize, she’s regularly commissioned to write new work, most recently The World May Be the Same with the writer Hannah Lavery (Rhubarb Press, 2023) about the experience of people of color in Scotland (supported by The Edwin Morgan Trust), and the sequence Sister (Stellar Quines, 2023) about the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran.
An Iranian-American who has lived in the UK for over 20 years, Marjorie is a Co-Founder and Director of the charity Open Book, which runs over 1,200 shared reading and creative writing workshops each year across Scotland, and Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees for StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.
Hexham, Northumberland
England
"Lotfi’s imagistically rich debut collection moves from her childhood in Iran, where her family were uprooted by the revolution, to her youth in America and her current home in Scotland. Lotfi is sensitively attuned to the painful dislocation of self that can come from moving between different nations … Again and again her radiant language turns over the loss of family intimacy and identity caused by political upheaval and violence … Lotfi’s book mourns these losses and separations, while at the same time rendering the possibilities of a capacious, multifaceted sense of belonging: 'And what is home if not the choice — / over and over again — to stay?'"
– Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian
"Loss echoes through this collection; loved ones, the voices of the many lost at sea trying to find a safe haven, or national (collective) moments of grief. Home is a sense of absence a well as being present but Lotfi leaves a light ablaze, 'like a candle in a cathedral, for the keeping of vigil'."
— Roy McFarlane, Poetry Book Society
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
