‘The Name’ (after Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘The Well’)
Sophia Pinto Thomas

1. Sophia: world-traveling wisdom

They named me my name for the beauty,
with a nickname “so-phi” that my grandmothers adored.
Through a return of ancestral, old devotion
in the ruins, I can hear them call — “so” —
then “phi” of the second syllable.
The open “ah” that follows last
has the leaves of all my dead,
where they watch me from the trees along the river through the ruins.

2. Pinto: to paint or to be painted

My middle name is beckoning the ocean,
or the olive trees;
an easel and brushes were staples growing up in my parent’s house.
I hear the calls cross continents
in the “pin”, and the foreign “toh.”
My grandmothers were northern women,
holding the trees and the cold,
and my dead are among all the leaves
the way our paintings hold my childhood.

3. Thomas: an old Welsh crest

Those castles glare cloudily
with the “thom” that my familymen carry;
On a moorland of prejudicial work that pervades lives the “as” of our final syllable.
Where we choose which homes will be homes for us, and whether flags can mend the coastline,
there’s a floodplain spread

from my fathers’ name, from those ruins of old kings’ islands. The middle place is my mother’s lands, the final part is ours. From the north where they hold the saplings,
all my women — come to the coastline,

and the “so-phi-ya” they gave me bears the love of a headstrong world.