Fahad Al-Amoudi is a poet and editor of Ethiopian and Yemeni heritage based in London. His work is published in Poetry London, bath magg, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and Butcher’s Dog. He is the winner of the White Review Poet’s Prize 2022, alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation, graduate of the Writing Squad and member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He is the Reviews Editor for Magma and the editor for the Runaways London Anthology with Ink Sweat & Tears Press.

Email: fahadalamoudi14@gmail.com

_____

of the burnt skin

‘Here Phaethon lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared’

and like the boys before him, bruised and spectral,
lamenting his mother in search of his father’s palace,
he marked the clay, dividing the poet from his people
as the sun divided the land; he cut his shadow off by its ear
with a dull knife, bloodletting seas, a ritual in service of
silence; had they known what he’d become
they might have called him beautiful, his winged foot
a point on the horizon bursting with light

in his parent’s birthplace, they found him of the burnt skin
against a crest in the road with thoughts of paradise;
his stillborn siblings now poplar trees who reunite him
with his shadow; he welcomes them both with the same
precision; he has his mother’s eyes, a smile bearing teeth
around the city’s edge, and like the boys before him,
he discards prayer for song, carrying the garland of names
with the devotion of a crown.