Afshan Shafi
This year for The Aleph Review website, Senior Contributing Editor Afshan Shafi has chosen films as her meta-theme. Here, read her brilliant musing on The Godfather Trilogy, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
They do not emerge
From fog or the organs
Of big fish
Recondite-souled, they whisper into abscesses,
Their viscera,
Rifle-butted
Into sheets of polished zinc
Black-suited at dawn,
They lay bushels
Of ivory carnations
At the doors of their bereft
When they depart
They hunch into
A kind of belated curtsy.
The clouds above them,
Empty onto the streets—
Frizz of red-brass, and collar-bones
Encased in tin
At leisure, they fleck
Hoops of ash
Onto the shoulders of their heaving compatriots.
Summer shrouds them in purple lapels—
Setting the clocks to frenzy—
They dispassionately whiten
In rooms where the sunlight
Peters out into
Tongues of old blood
Though there are altars
Engorged on the hearths
Of the cabal’s glassy domiciles,
Their women mostly
Riven to sand
And cracked signets
Each day,
The coercion of time, itself,
Seems negligible
Each day,
The silences
Brood themselves into
Clamor
Each day, the bald-lights
Of the streets seem to constrict
Further into ominous vapor
Each day,
Wolves round the squat, belching operatives
To roosts that have no name.
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