Things You’ve Never Seen

Things You’ve Never Seen

Fady Joudah

When I tell it, the first time

I saw hail, I say

it was in a desert and knocked

a man unconscious

then drove a woman into my arms

because she thought the end was near

but I assured her

this wasn’t the case.

When he tells it,

he smiles, says the first winter

after their exodus

was the coldest.

Rare snow

came down, and his mother,

who knew what the fluff was

but until then had never seen it,

woke him and said, Look outside,

what do you see?

She called his name twice.

It was dark. Snow fell

a paragraph to sum up

decades of heat. He had

no answer. She said,

this is flour from heaven.

When he tells it,

he’s an old man returning

to his mother.

Things You’ve Never Seen by Fady Joudah - Poems | poets.org