KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Marian Haddad
Photograph by Dan Williams
"Fore(Shadow) & Light: for Ukraine"
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When I first saw this image, I wanted to say,
beautiful angle, beautiful sky
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I wanted to say, angle of shadow, angle of light
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Part of me wanted to love, care; I settled for like, but "winds chimes here warn of war"
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cannot be liked (but for mellifluousness of rhythm,
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of sound, in this haunting night); no, war,
cannot be liked. How man is more shadow
than light
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on such a staggering, invasive night
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--- of "cruise and ballistic missile strikes"
--- how "wind chimes here warn of war" haunts
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--- and how we seem to hear
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these chimes rattle tinny in desert air
in this almost-very-still life
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haunting just before
the monsters strike
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mh
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"Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart."
---Brothers Karamazov
Marian Haddad, MFA is a Pushcart-nominated poet, writer, manuscript & publishing consultant, private writing mentor, lecturer and creative workshop instructor. Her collection of poems, Wildflower. Stone., (Pecan Grove Press 2011), is the first hardback in the nearly-25-years the press was in existence.
Haddad's chapbook, Saturn Falling Down, was published at the request of Texas Public Radio in correlation with their Hands-on Poetry workshops (2003). Her full-length collection, Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home (Pecan Grove Press, 2004) approached its fifth printing before the passing of editor/publisher H. Palmer Hall.
Her poems, essays, reviews, and articles have been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies within the US, Belgium, the U.K., and the Middle East; some recent publications appear in an anthology of Texas and Louisiana poets, Improbable Worlds (Mutabilis Press), Before there Is Nowhere to Stand, an anthology of Arab and Jewish poets on the Palestinian Israeli conflict (Lost Horse Press), and an essay about juxtaposing the music of poetry to the music and pacing of basketball, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, (Michigan State University Press) and HOT! A chapbook on climate change (Bihl Haus Arts).
Haddad has taught creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake and Northwest Vista College, and International and American Literature at St. Mary's University and conducts workshops and private consultations at her home and on-site at the invitation of various schools and institutions. Her works in progress include a nearly-completed collection of poems, In this City of Saints, and a collection of essays about growing up Arab American in a Mexican American border town, as well as ten additional working manuscripts. She has blogged under the invitation of then-travel-editor for the San Antonio Express on her 2008 travels to Syria on mysa.com, and hosted a blog for the same, entitled WORD UP, as one of the City Lights bloggers the paper invited.