The First Thing

2 Dhu'l-Hijjah 1425 - Poem 2

By Mohja Kahf

I am Hagar the immigrant

There came to me the revelation
of the water

I left the world of Abraham,
jugs sealed with cork,
cooking-grease jars,
Sarah’s careful kitchen fires

The horizon is a razor
I moved across, severing
great expanses, slates
of earth, sediment
of ancient seas, toward this
revelation

to stand alone at this frontier:
where the shape of the cup of morning is strange
and dome of sky, mat of earth have shifted,
where God does not have a house yet
and the times for prayer have not been appointed,

where the only water is buried deep
under hard ground and I must find it
or my child will die, my people
remain unborn
The first thing
the founder does
is look for water

I am Hagar, mother
of a people
I stand here
straddling the end and the beginning

Each rock cuts into the heel like God
Each step is blood, is risk:

is prayer

This poem first appeared in Nathalie Handal, ed., Arab Women Poets in the Turning Century. New York: Interlink Publications, 2001