Fady Joudah

The bride asks him about the shoe.

He tells her he lost it while jumping over a house wall, breaking away from soldiers.

She asks, tea with sage or tea with mint?

With sage, he says.

Sweet scent, bitter tongue.

She makes it, he drinks.

I had a feeling from, I guess, a younger age now that if I was going to... I guess this doesn't sound humble when you say this, but I think we all need a little delusion when we are in our own privacy.

If I was going to strike some kind of gold with my own poem...

that I had to create a mythic feeling.

And I feel like the way we, one essential way that poets stay with, poems stay with us, is that when the poems succeed in having a conversation with time, and it feels like it is having a conversation with time,

And so somewhere along the way at a younger age, I realized that half the stuff that I loved in poetry was because it survived in time.

And I didn't know why.

So when I was working on my own poems, I always struggled with how does time work in the poem?

Sometimes it doesn't.

I think I would say it is about memory sometimes.

And the senses do engage our memories.

So if in a more direct sense, you know, when as a child you're introduced first to tea, I'm sure you have your own experiences of that.

Let's just make it really clear.

Right.

I remember that everybody around me is drinking tea with sage or tea with mint and the aroma is not quite what the taste is.