HAIL MARYAM

by Safa Hijazi

Kãf-Ha-Ya-’Aĩn- Ṣãd. 
 كٓهيعٓصٓ

I. 
      On the floor, I wake to a nightly impulse;
      I listen to Surat Maryam then Ave Maria
      Then Surat Maryam again. 
            Hail Mary, Hail Mary

      I kneel at the edge of my bookcase.
      Our Lady of Lebanon stares at me. 
      Mary? 
            Can you hear me? 
      Is it wrong to say 
      That I think of you more 
            Than I think of your son? 

	Show me how to have unwavering devotion. 

II. 
      I am ten in my bed, 
      Whispering to the ceiling for a sister.
      A girl without a sister is a 
      Girl with half a heart.
      What is a woman with a child, 
      Yet not knowing a man’s touch? 

      Unlike you,
      I bear no miracles. 

      I’m twenty now, circling my bedroom,
      Saintly humming enclosing me.




Note: Kãf-Ha-Ya-’Aĩn- Ṣãd (transcribed from Arabic) is a series of letters that begins Surat Maryam: the chapter on the Virgin Mary in the Quran.

Safa Hijazi is a Lebanese writer from Michigan. She was a winner of the Hopwood Poetry Award and first-place winner of the Marjorie Rapaport Award in Poetry in 2025. Safa was also the first-place winner of the Hopwood Nonfiction Award in 2024. Previously, she served as an Assistant Managing Editor for Michigan Quarterly Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Portland Review, Rowayat Journal, Common Grown Review, Frontier Poetry, Full Bleed, the minnesota review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.