Cover art for These Branches Are Full and These Orchards Heavy by Anis Mojgani

These Branches Are Full and These Orchards Heavy

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These Branches Are Full and These Orchards Heavy Lyrics

But our ears are too small for our hearts to understand
The humming of these sentences inside


"We are trying to decipher the bang, buck, braile of Your silent throat, Lord"
But the voices they grow and grow just as fuzzy

So we stand and go to the kitchens
And pick up knives to cut these voices out from inside
We stab ourselves
"I must hear You"


We stab, cutting the flap of our skin
The words twisting on the floor of our homes
Mixing their sounds with our blood
They drown, but it does not stop
"I must hear you"

We hear these same songs in the stomachs of others
So we grab more knives to cut those out but there are more and more stomachs
We need bigger knives
We need soldiers, tanks, and missiles
But we still cannot make out the words
We need dead mothers, children raped from searching
The hospitals are full and overflowing
From us trying to cut our God from our gut

With the blade, the pipe, the fingernail twist of the drug
Pushed and poked through the arm to the belly to throw Him up
And in the bang of the scream
We find our saviour
The shell in the chamber is a quiet plea to a distant God
Asking for us to be remembered by Him
Through the tire tread
Through the smoke from the tank
The crunch from the skull of the babies we bury beneath us
We empty them out to see a scrap of our Lord
Still lingered somewhere inside there

We clutch throats, pistols, and palms in the same two-handed clasp of prayer
Staring into the mirror we see crypts
Fondling the marble of our hearts like they are mausoleums
We are ghosts
Hungry for something bigger than what are mouths are kissing

Let me see You
Let me see You, Lord
I am balanced int he middle of the question
Black as my eye
Beaten by Your hymn, I am holding still

So go ahead
You gentlemen of God
Tender sinners

Take your rifles
Raise to my gut and fire on

Here the song more clearly
It does not sing what you wish it did
It is too big for us to even see a letter of it
Cut Him from me
I wish to drape His face with my kisses
And finally sleep softly

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Genius Annotation

The title is a reference to Kalil Gibran’s book, The Prophet:

Shall my heart become a tree heavy-laden with fruit that I may gather and give unto them? “
- Kalil Gibran

It covers themes of religious violence, martyrdom and the horror of war. It first appeared in print in 2007, via the 27th addition of Rattle magazine.

It was then included in Mojgani’s poetry collection, Over the Anvil We Stretch.

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