Love Letters from the End of Time by George Abraham

Addressed to the speaker's father, this tender sonnet sequence by George Abraham speaks of forgiveness, regret, longing, and legacy. Comparing their similarities – like 'a mirror that can't be held' – the speaker brings himself into his father's image while also looking beyond, at a relationship with a man who sees him for who he is. 

This piece is commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities. 

Supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

At the end of the world, I still 
               couldn’t say I love you

though I never blamed you for your escape
to mid-afternoon saunas, father, nor how you’d stay  

in that steam – to drown the noise of your wife, 
I imagine, whose only language was broken

glass those days – just short enough not to arouse  
suspicion. 
              Could you have imagined me, your son,  

who'd grow into this language of open 
showers & serviced stains on white 

towels? A son who’d crawl out of open 
windows, beneath your snores, for mid-week 

bathhouse discounts, to find brief comfort 
in a thousand anonymous languages  

of touch: a hand flirting with a towel’s beneath, 
the roaming eyes of another man, searching.  

At the end of the world, you still
               couldn’t say I love you

because in the eyes of mens’ searching, 
your world has ended a thousand times  

& again. & before it ended in you, it ended
in your father, & his father before. Who could want  

to see themselves in those threads
of empire, with no names for broken hearts  

but catastrophe, setback? How can I 
speak of your aunties, a country 

ago, forced to marry at fifteen & not 
the soldiers who translated dowry into arms’ 

escape? Who made, of marriage 
certificates, the kind of blue  

only a passport could dream of? A blue 
that named you before I could call you Baba?  

At the end of your world, I still
               couldn’t say I love you  

Baba. There, I named you. I’m calling out
to you, & once you were still alive  

to call back: ya Baba. I know parenthood
as the kind of mirror that can’t be held  

in every tongue. When your father died, 
he left Teita languageless in the eyes  

of this country. 
                           After, you begged for a job
you didn’t want, in an English insistent  

only in its opposition to your language 
of love, so that she, your mother, may live.  

Not knowing you’d die in that job, you kept it
so that I might live, in infancy, as Teita raised me 

in her insistence of Arabic: it was my first love 
story, that broke more hearts beyond my own.  

At the end of our world, we still
               tried to say I love you.

A story: Teita broke more hearts beyond her own 
when she, widowed & mid-50’s, married  

her childhood sweetheart. When the family 
didn’t speak to her for years, was it desire 

or loneliness that made her their unbearable 
myth? Years later, auntie will admit  

she regretted all of it. 
                                         She who, after 4 decades
of marriage, still retreats to her bedroom  

every night, hand in hand, not with her husband, 
but her best friend — a brown woman trailing  

behind with a plate of lukewarm microwavables.
Her husband – rooms away, watching re-runs –  

unmoving. Not a word spoken between any of them.
Yet, clearly & immaculately, they are understood.  

At the end of the world, we still
               didn’t say I love you. 

Clearly & immaculately, I am understood 
by you: the friend, with whom, safety enough  

to undress & shower together after a swim. 
                                                                                  There, 
I remember Baba’s stories, of laughing nakedly,  

in crowded YMCA locker rooms, at how misshapen 
a butt becomes with age. 
                                                Instead, our story is a dusk 

of held breaths — in the lake’s impossible cold, 
you’d adjust my swim cap. Afraid of falling in almost 

-love, I’d avoid your gaze. 
                                            Beyond survival, a holding 
from which neither of us can let go. Forgive me — 

beneath those waters, my eye contact was moments
too long. 
                  Did desire lead us here, or are our deaths 

already behind us? You, who descended this rotting 
hell, who led me to the gates without glancing back?  

At the end of our world, we still 
               couldn’t say I love you 

to hell & back, you who led me to the gates
of our unmaking. Who wouldn’t fall in love   

with, at least, the idea of us? Where romance precedes 
the wide-bottomed wine glass? Where we’ve stopped  

counting the apocalyptic skies, grayed into green,
under which we drove, without stopping to consider  

the polluted river between our smogged cities: diseased 
membrane, border of pigment & cum 

-ulus? Where dusk is but a lip into which we refused 
to bite? This, our world, suspended in a season 

of Capricorns. Beloved, I’ve entertained the delusion, 
of us, for too long. Unjustly, I’ve unravelled like this, 

before, into the only arms that can bear to hold me. 
I am drowning in your image. I cannot resurface.  

At the end of your world, none of us 
               could say I love you.

From the image, I cannot resurface: 
Mama, drunk & giggling, over you, Baba, 

kneeling in surrender, when considered from my gaze 
over the two of you, or the view of clothes scattered  

beneath another failed attempt at dressing 
your body, unwounded, you thought, days before

your last words to her would be, I love y – 
I love – with eyes just short of meeting

hers. 
              At his bedside, she'll tell her therapist 
months later, I was at his bedside when he ...

He was a good husband, allah yerhamo. 
                                                        As if in confession, 
she'll kneel at your grave, apologise for being

a bad wife and not the wife who survived you 
by translating your suffering into her own.

After the end of your world, I'm still
               trying to say I love you

by translating your suffering into my own:
how my injured hand, when strained to its limits 

of motion, resembles the oblique angle 
at which your hand would point itself  

as your disease consumed you, Baba. How, 
against a failed science, I want to know it 

as the most Palestinian death: how it took,
first, your ability to move, before taking  

your ability to speak. I don’t want to make you 
a metaphor, Baba, should not country you  

as I did in life. You will not be languaged 
here, you will be language: a lack  

in my throat, I’ll be chasing my whole life. 
I could never blame you for your escape.  

Illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe

This sonnet sequence appears in George Abraham's forthcoming book, When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America, publishing on 16 March 2027 by Haymarket Books.