MY NAME, BUT NOT MY PAPERS: SADIQA DE MEIJER


Sadiqa de Maijer photo by Cat London
Sadiqa de Meijer writes: This is the title poem from my new collection. I've always liked the riddle of how to get the fox, goose and grain across the river, when some will eat the other if left alone. Older versions of that quandary sometimes feature a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. I wanted to ask, particularly from a multi-ethnic and diasporic perspective, what if we look at that cargo, and even the landscape of the river itself, as internal to the speaker?

Sadiqa de Meijer
THE OUTER WARDS

I saw that I would have to cross the river,
and that it was the Rijn.
I had a fox, a goose, a sack of grain.

I said, I love the gay men in kufiyas on the Rembrandtplein,
and the muted half of me, from a land of five converging waters,
with an upstream alphabet—
so what makes me yours
every night, slow current, floodplain
of drowning grass?

Then the goose was in the reeds. It had an egg.
Twigs and quills, the ruckus of two pulses.
The grain had blown into my field. Someone was claiming it.
And the fox was a vanishing streak.

I could take my name, but not my papers.
I could take the swept air, but not my breath,
or not in one load. My promises, but not the child
I’d made them to, unless I could bring something back—
but the weather, the barges, the clouds turning orange and rose.


 The Outer Wards, Sadiqa de Meijer's second collection, was published in April 2020 by Vehicule Press.