Spy Poetry: Insha’Allah by Danusha Lameris

Editor’s Note:  Let us carry our tender hopes into the new year and whisper to whatever god we believe in to let them come to fruition. 

Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech
that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”
Insha’Allah I will see you next summer.
The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah.
Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain.

So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled
easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers.

Every language must have a word for this. A word
our grandmothers uttered under their breath
as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon,
hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes,
dropping the discarded skins into a bowl.

Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah.
Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah
the rice will be enough to last through winter.

How lightly we learn to hold hope,
as if it were an animal that could turn around
and bite your hand. And still we carry it
the way a mother would, carefully,
from one day to the next.

Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California and born to a Dutch father and a Barbadian mother. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was honored with the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Laméris also served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her debut collection, The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Laméris’s second book, Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and the recipient of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Blade by Blade (2024), is now available from Copper Canyon Press. She is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.