Neither a star,
nor a prophet's inspiration,
nor a face praying to the moon,
is Mihyar.
Here he comes
like a pagan spear,
invading the land of letters,
bleeding
and raising to the sun
his bleeding.
Here he is,
wearing the nakedness of stone
and praying to the caves.
Here he is,
cuddling the light Earth.
A VOICE
Mihyar is a face
betrayed by its lovers.
Mihyar is bells
without chiming.
Mihyar is inscribed upon the faces,
a song which visits us secretly
on white, exiled roads.
Mihyar is bells of wanderers
in this Galilean land.
A VISION / 1
Put on the mask of burnt wood,
O, Babel of fire and mysteries.
I await the god who comes
draped in flames,
adorned with pearls
stolen from oysters
out of the lung of the sea.
I await the god who feels perplexed,
rages, weeps, bows and glows .
Your face, O, Mihyar,
heralds the coming god.
A KING IS MIHYAR
A king is Mihyar.
A king -
the dream is his palace
and gardens of fire.
And today,
a dying voice complained about him
to words.
A king is Mihyar.
In the kingdom of the wind he lives,
and in the land of mysteries he reigns.
THE ADORING ROCK
The wandering is over,
and the road
is an adoring rock.
Here we are,
burying the corpse of the day,
draped in the winds of tragedy.
But tomorrow we shall shake
the trunks of the forest of palms.
And tomorrow we shall wash
the body of the slender god
with the blood of the thunderbolt,
and construct the tenuous lines
between our eyelids and the road.
THE TWO CORPSES
I buried in your subservient entrails,
in the head, the hands and eyes,
a minaret;
I buried two corpses,
the Earth and the sky.
O, tribe,
O, womb of wasps,
and mill of the wind.
TRAVELLING
Travelling,
but staying still.
O, sun,
how do I attain the skill
of your footsteps ?
I SAID UNTO YOU
I said unto you:
I listened to the seas
reading to me their verses
I listened to the bells
slumbering inside the oyster shells.
I said unto you:
I sang my songs
at Satan's wedding
and the feast of the fable.
I said unto you:
I beheld,
in the rain of history
and the glow of the distance
a fairy and a dwelling.
Because I sail in my eyes,
I said unto you, I beheld
everything
in the first step of the distance.
ADAM
Adam whispered to me
in a husky sigh, in silence and moaning:
"I'm not the father of the world,
I haven't glimpsed Paradise.
Take me to the Lord."
THE PRESENCE
I open a door unto the Earth
and set ablaze the fire of presence,
in the clouds intersecting
or trailing one another,
in the ocean and its infatuated waves,
in the mountains and their forests,
and in the rocks,
creating for the pregnant nights
a homeland
in the ashes of the roots,
in the fields of songs,
in the thunder and thunderbolts,
and feeding to the fires
the mummies of the ages.
DEATH
We die unless we create the gods.
We die unless we murder the gods.
O, kingdom of the bewildered rock.
A LAND OF NO RETURN
Even if you return, O, Odysseus;
even if spaces close around you,
and the guide is burnt to ashes
in your bereaved face
or your friendly terror,
you will remain a history of wandering,
you will remain in a land of no promise,
you will remain in a land of no return.
Even if you return,
O, Odysseus.
THE FLOOD / 1
Mihyar sang cried acquitted prayed indicted,
blessed the face of madness,
dissolved in his voice
the wounds of the ages,
desired his voice to be
a flood,
and a flood it was.
THE TREE OF FIRE
A family of leaves is sitting near the
spring,
wounding the land of tears
and reading to the water
the book of fire.
My family didn't await my arrival.
It departed.
No fire is left, no traces.
A ROAD
O, road which refuses to begin,
we are a face that has beheld
and loved daylight and presence.
There was a god in our land
but we abandoned him
since he distanced himself
from us.
Behind him we burnt
the temple of wax and the sacrifices.
And out of absence
we forged an idol of dust
and stoned him with the presence,
with the road which almost began.
O, road which refuses to begin.
NO WORDS BETWEEN US
Will the sands clear away from our
eyelashes?
Will the torrents cleanse the land of husks?
Disintegrate and burn, O, seeds;
no words are left between us ,
no echo.
And the bridges have crumbled
before the roads.
A HOMELAND
To faces which wither under the mask of
melancholy,
I bow.
To roads on which I forgot my tears,
to a father who died as green as a cloud
with a sail upon his face,
I bow
And to a child who is sold
in order to pray and polish shoes,
(in my country, we all pray and polish shoes),
and to rocks upon which I carved with my hunger
that they were lightning and rain
rolling under my eyelids,
and to a house whose soil I carried in my wanderings,
I bow.
All these are my homeland-
Not Damascus.
KING OF THE WINDS
My banner is an end.
It neither fraternises
nor meets half-way.
An end are my songs.
Here I am,
amassing the flowers,
alerting the trees,
erecting the sky as a colonnade,
loving , living and getting born
in my words.
Here I am,
gathering the butterflies
under the morning's banner,
nurturing the fruits,
and dwelling with rain
in the clouds and their bells,
in the seas.
Here I am,
sailing the stars
and anchoring them,
and crowning myself
king of the winds.
THE EARTH
How often you have said:
"I have my other homeland,
and your eyes filled with tears,
and your palms filled with the lightning
of its approaching regions.
Have your eyes ever known
that the land recognises
every single passer- by
save your own footsteps,
wherever they cried or rejoiced,
here, as you sang, or there?
Have your eyes ever known
that the land is but one:
dried of udder and entrails?
Have your eyes come to know
that the land is ignorant
of the rites of rejection?
Have your eyes realised
that you are the very land?
THE END OF THE WORLD
The possible concerns me not,
be it painful or delightful.
For in my hymns I invent
a gospel of my own,
and seek a refuge
for a world that commences
at the frontiers of the world.
THE LITTLE TIME / 1
The illusive mirage is ours
and the blind days.
And ours is the corpse of the guide,
we, the generation of the Ark,
the offspring of this little Time.
The peaceful seas,
the seas that chant
the elegies of wandering,
have handed us to the wilderness.
We, the generation of the endless dialogue
between our ruins and the Lord.
THE COLOUR OF THE WATER
Your colour is the colour of water,
O, body of words,
when water is leaven
or a thunderbolt or fire-
And water blazed,
became a thunderbolt,
became leaven and fire
and water lilies
which ask about my pillow
and fall asleep.
O, river of words,
journey with me for a couple of days,
a couple of weeks,
in the leaven of mysteries
to pick up the seas or explore the oysters.
Let us rain rubies and ebony
to learn that magic
is a black fairy
who loves nobody except the sea.
Journey with me,
emerging here and vanishing there.
And ask with me,
O, river of words,
about the shells which die to become
a red cloud
cascading its rain;
about an island
which walks or flies.
And ask with me,
O, river of words,
about a star captive
in the water nets,
carrying under its breasts
my last days.
And ask with me,
O, river of words,
about a stone from which water flows,
about a wave from which rocks are born,
about the animal of musk,
and a dove of light.
And descend with me
to the nets of darkness
at the bottom
where broken Time lies.
And let words be
a poem that wears
the face of the sea.
THE WINDS OF MADNESS
The chariots of light have rusted;
so has the knight.
And here I am,
arriving from yonder,
from the land of barren roots,
my horse is a withering bud
and a siege is my road.
Why do you stare in mockery?
Escape, escape,
for I come from yonder,
wearing the body of crime,
unleashing unto you
the winds of madness.
DAYLIGHT
Daylight attires us
in its ancient gowns,
lamenting us here,
lamenting us there,
opening its chest to defeat
and drawing the sign of the angel
upon our dismembered limbs
and footsteps.
TREACHERY
O, bliss of treason-
O, world which stretches in my footsteps
as an abyss and pools of fire-
O, ancient corpse-
O, world which I betrayed
and still betray.
I am that drowning figure
whose eyelids pray
to the roar of the waters.
And I am that god
who blesses the land of crime.
I am a traitor,
I sell my life
to the Satanic path.
I am the lord of treachery.
THE FLOOD / 2
Go, pigeon, go.
We do not want you to return.
They have surrendered their flesh to the rocks,
and I - here I am
sliding towards the deepest point,
entangled in the Ark's sails.
Our flood is a planet
that does not revolve,
ravaging and ancient-
In it we might scent
the god of buried centuries.
So, go, pigeon, go.
We do not want you to return.
FAREWELL
We bade you farewell years ago,
we bade you the repenting elegy,
O, halo of dead angels,
O, language of fugitive locusts.
The words are packed with mud.
The words have adorned themselves
with labour pains.
Our absent wombs return to us.
And here are the rains, here are the floods.
O, language of debris and ruins,
O, halo of dead angels.
THE LUMINOUS WINDS
The winds that extinguish-
the luminous winds-
are still behind us,
slow coming.
We and the terror are on the road,
and between us
are the Barada and the Euphrates.
How long we have borne them
in our wilderness
as banners of dust and laurel,
whispering them as our prayers,
the Barada and the Euphrates.
And the winds that extinguish-
the luminous winds-
are still behind us,
slow coming.
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE
What? Then you destroy the face of the Earth
and carve for it another face.
What? Then you have no choice
but the path of fire
and the hell of rejection,
when the Earth is no more
than a guillotine or a god.
TODAY I HAVE MY LANGUAGE
I have destroyed my kingdom,
destroyed my throne, my courts and colonnades.
And, borne over my lung,
I roamed in quest,
teaching the seas my rains, granting them
my fire and incense-burner,
and writing the time to come
on my lips.
And today I have my language,
my frontiers, my land and indelible mark,
and I have my peoples,
who nurture me on their uncertainty
and find their light
in my ruins and wings.
PRAYER
O, Phoenix, I pray
that you remain in the ashes,
that you don't glimpse the light or rise.
We've neither experienced your night
nor sailed across the darkness.
O, Phoenix, I pray
that the magic die,
that our rendezvous be in
the fire and the ashes.
O, Phoenix, I pray
that madness be our guide.
A VISION / 2
I glimpse among subservient books
in the yellow dome
a punctured city flying.
I glimpse walls of silk
and a murdered star
in a green bottle floating.
I glimpse a statue of tears,
of the clay of dismembered limbs,
of grovelling
in the presence of a prince.
BETWEEN YOUR EYES AND MINE
When I drown my eyes in your eyes,
I glimpse the deepest dawning
and see the ancient times;
I see what I do not comprehend
and feel the universe flowing
between your eyes and mine.
DIALOGUE
Who are you? Whom do you choose, O, Mihyar?
Wherever you go, there is God or Satan's abyss-
an abyss coming, an abyss going.
And the world is choice.
I choose neither God nor Satan.
Each is a wall.
Each closes my eyes.
Why replace one wall by another,
when my perplexity is the perplexity of the light-giving,
the perplexity of the all-knowing?
AN ELEGY FOR AL-HALLAJ
Your green poisonous plume,
your plume whose veins are filled with flames,
with the star rising from Baghdad,
is our history and imminent resurrection
in our land-in our repeated death.
Time lay upon your hands.
And the fire in your eyes
is sweeping, reaching the sky.
O, star rising from Baghdad,
laden with poetry and new birth,
O, poisonous green plume.
Nothing is left
for those coming from afar
with the echo and death and ice
in this land of resurrection.
Nothing is left but you and the presence.
O, you the language of Galilean thunder
in this land of discarded skins.
You, poet of the roots and mysteries.
THE FALL
I live between the plague and the fire
with my language,
with these speechless worlds.
I live in heaven and gardens of apples,
in the first ecstasy and despair,
between the hands of Eve -
Lord of that accursed Tree,
and lord of the fruits.
I live between the clouds and sparks,
in a stone that grows and grows,
in a book that teaches
the secrets and the Fall.
A STONE
I worship this peaceful stone
in whose countenance I see
my face
and my lost poetry.
THE LANGUAGE OF SIN
I burn my inheritance, I say :
"My land is virgin, and no graves in my youth. "
I transcend both God and Satan;
(my path goes beyond the paths of God and Satan).
I go across in my book,
in the procession of the luminous thunderbolt,
the procession of the green thunderbolt,
shouting :
After me, there's no Paradise, no Fall,
and abolishing the language of sin.
ORPHEUS
A lover rolling in the darkness of Hell
like a stone, I am.
But I shine.
I have a date with the priestesses
in the bed of the ancient god.
My words are tempests that rattle life,
and sparks are my songs.
I am a language for a god to come,
I am the sorcerer of dust.
THE ONLY EARTH
I dwell in these wandering words,
my face a companion to my face,
and my face is my path,
in your name, O, land of mine
which grows longer and longer,
bewitched and forlorn;
in your name, O, death,
my friend.
THE DAMS
Always dawn is read and repeated.
Always these caves beneath the skin.
Always these dams and debris,
and these almshouses.
Always these cemeteries under the eyelashes,
these dismembered limbs, these victims
of your songs,
where there is no land in your face,
no dance, no birth.
Always the abortion in your veins.
You have a star in the husk,
a legacy in the rock,
and in daylight a homeland.
O, prince of emptiness,
O, language in which
winds and dimensions
become hollow.
A GOD WHO LOVES HIS SUFFERING
To the god tearing in my footsteps,
I, the accursed Mihyar,
raise the dead as offerings
and say the prayer of wounded wolves.
But the graves yawning inside my words
have hugged my songs
with a god who lifts the stones
from over us;
a god who loves his suffering
and blesses even Hell;
a god who prays my prayers,
and returns to the face of life
its lost innocence.
TO SISYPHUS
I vowed to write upon water,
I vowed to bear with Sisyphus
his speechless rock.
I vowed to stay with Sisyphus
suffering the fevers and the sparks,
and seeking in blind eyes
a last plume
that writes for autumn and grass
the poem of dust.
I vowed to live with Sisyphus.
THE FACE OF A WOMAN
I dwell in the face of a woman
who dwells in a wave
flung by the tide
to a shore that has lost its harbour
in its shells.
I live in the face of a woman
who murders me ,
who desires to be
a dead beacon
in my blood sailing
to the very end of madness.
THE ROAD
The road is a woman
who places the palm of the traveller
in the palm of the lover,
and fills the palm of the lover
with yearning and its shells-
a woman,
a dream turned by a woman
into a boat as narrow as a wing
wearing the rose of the winds
and forsaking its harbour.
THE MAN'S SONG
Sideways
I saw your face
engraved on the trunk of a palm tree;
and saw the sun
black in your hands.
So I mounted my yearning
towards the palms
carrying the night in a basket,
carrying the city,
and scattering myself
around your eyes,
exploring my face.
I saw your face
as hungry as a child.
I surrounded it with amulets,
and over it
I crumbled
like a succulent jasmine.
THE WOMAN'S SONG
Sideways
I saw your face
aged and snatched by days and sorrows.
It came to me embracing
its green bottles,
hurrying up the last supper.
Each bottle was a gulf,
the wedding of a gulf and a boat
in which days and shores
sank,
and sea gulls explored their past,
and the sailor
explored his future days.
Your face came to me so hungry;
I spread out my adoration
for it
a loaf and a glass and a bed.
I opened the doors for the sun and the winds,
and shared with your face
the last supper.
A SCENE
The thunderbolt
interrogates the stone,
puts the sky on trial,
puts every thing on trial.
The thunderbolt
bathes in my eyes.
And the days
drop in my hands
like ripened fruits.
THE ROCK
I am contented with what you desire:
my songs are my bread,
and my words are my kingdom.
O, rock, weigh heavily upon my steps.
I've carried you like dawn on my shoulders
and drawn you as a vision upon my countenance.
THE ANCIENT HOMELAND
I surrendered to the rocks and the echoes
my banners with their stifled voices.
I surrendered them to the fortress of dust,
to the dignity of rejection and defeat.
Nothing remains for me except you-
O, mysteries,
O, my ancient homeland.
THE LANTERN
In the midday sun
he carries his lantern,
searching for a human soul.
No sand in his eyes,
wearing the sandals of dust.
He walks in a barrel,
his hands are his quilt.
-And you, what?
-I have no eyes.
Between me and my brothers rises Cain.
Between me and the Other roars the flood.
When night and daylight fall asleep,
I steal by the blood-thirsty butcher.
I walk-
dust walking behind me-
but I carry no lantern.
ODYSSEUS
Who are you? From what peaks have you
descended,
O, virgin language, which only you understand.
What's your name ? What banner
have you carried or discarded¤?
Asks Alkenos,
desiring to unveil the face of the dead man.
She asks from what peaks I have descended,
asks about my name-
My name is Odysseus.
I come from a land with no bounds,
carried on people's backs.
I was lost here, was lost there,
with my verses.
And here I am,
in the terror and withering,
knowing neither how to stay
nor how to return.
THE FEATHER OF THE CROW
1.
Coming with no flowers, coming without
fields,
I have nothing in the sands or the winds,
nothing in the morning's majesty,
except youthful blood
which flows with the sky .
And in my prophetic forehead
the Earth is an endless flock of birds.
Coming without seasons,
coming with neither flowers nor fields,
with a fountain of dust in my eyes,
I feed on my eyes.
I live, driving my life in waiting
for an ark which sinks to the bottom
as if dreaming or wandering,
or going never to return.
2.
In the cancer of silence, under siege,
I write my verses on the earth
with the feather of a crow.
I know; there is no light upon my eyelids,
nothing but the wisdom of dust.
I crouch with daylight in the coffee shop
with the wood of the chair
and the discarded cigarette butts.
I sit in waiting
for my forgotten rendezvous.
3.
I want to kneel down, to pray
to the broken-winged owl,
to the embers of the winds.
I want to pray
to the bewildered star in the sky,
to death, to the plague.
I want to burn in my incense
my white days, my songs and notebooks,
my ink and ink pot.
I want to pray
to anything that knows no prayer.
4.
Beirut didn't rise in my path,
Beirut didn't bloom.
And here are my fields.
Beirut didn't fruit.
And here is the spring of sand and locusts
filling my fields.
Alone without flowers or seasons;
alone with fruits.
From the setting of the sun to its rising,
I cross Beirut, but see it not,
inhabit Beirut and see it not.
Alone with love and fruits,
together with daylight, we go
migrating to another city.
A MIRROR FOR KHALIDA
1- The Wave
Khalida
a sorrow around which branches leaf.
Khalida
a voyage which submerges the day
in the waters of the eyes,
a wave which has taught me
that the light of stars,
that the face of clouds
and the moaning of dust
are all one flower.
2- Under the Water
We slept in a garment
woven out of the cherries of night.
The night was specks of dust,
and the bowels
the rejoicing of blood, the rhythm of castanets
and the rays of suns submerged under the water.
And pregnant was the night.
3- Being Lost
Once, I got lost in your hands,
my lip a fortress enamoured with siege,
yearning for a wild conquest.
And you advanced.
Your waist was a sultan,
your hands the spearhead of the army,
your eyes a hiding place and a friend.
We fused, lost ourselves together, entered the forest of flames-
I draw the first step,
and you open the road...
4- Tiredness
The old tiredness around the house
now has its urns and its balcony.
It slumbers in its huts, sinking into absence.
How we worried about it in its wanderings;
we ran circling round the house,
asking each sheaf of grass,
praying,
crying when we glimpsed it:
How, what, and where?
Every wind has been,
every bough has been,
but you have not...
5- Death.
After these moments, the little time will
come,
and will come the repeated steps and roads.
After these moments, the houses will age,
and the bed will extinguish
the flames of its days
and die.
And the pillows, too, will die.
A MIRROR FOR THE CORPSE OF AUTUMN
Have you seen a woman
who carries the corpse of autumn,
mixing her face with the pavement
and weaving from the strands of rain
her dress,
while people
in the ashes of the pavement
are dead embers?
A MIRROR FOR ABU AL-'ALA'
I recall that I visited your eyes
in al-Ma'arra,
and listened to your footsteps.
I recall that the grave was walking,
emulating your footsteps.
And around your grave,
your voice was slumbering like a quiver
in the body of days or the body of words
on the bed of poetry.
Your parents were not there.
Nor was al-Ma'arra.
A MIRROR FOR THE CLOUDS
Wings;
but they are made of wax .
And the rain cascading
is no rain,
but ships for tears.
A MIRROR FOR THE 20th CENTURY
child's face.
A book
inscribed on the entrails of a crow.
A monster drawing close,
holding a flower.
A rock
breathing in the lungs of a madman.
This is,
this is the twentieth century.
A MIRROR FOR THE ADORING BODY
Every day
the adoring body melts in the air,
becomes a fragrance;
it revolves, summoning every fragrance
to come to its bed,
enshroud its dreams,
dissolve as incense
and as incense return.
Its first verses are a child's torment
lost in the whirlpool of bridges,
knowing neither how to stay
in the water, nor how to cross.
A MIRROR FOR THE WITNESS
When the spears came to rest in the dying
gasp of Husain,
and adorned themselves with the body of Husain,
and the horses trampled every pore in the body of Husain,
and plundered and despoiled
were the garments of Husain,
I saw every stone leaning tenderly over
Husain,
I saw every flower sleeping on the shoulder of Husain,
I saw every river
walking in the funeral of Husain.
THE MIRROR OF ORBITING
After the fire of orbiting,
after the nectar of the wound and the dream
in the bed of the fruit harvest,
the passion for transcendence shone forth.
I climbed my yearning and its fire,
then we travelled
away from an oozing island of scum
through the carpet of the translucent universe.
And today I am an astral savour.
I contemplate my image in a mirror and melt Time
into a mirror of arresting light
for my divining face,
for the day as sharp as the heart,
for the conquest,
for the magic of infinities and dimensions.
A MIRROR FOR ORPHEUS
Your sorrowful lyre, Orpheus,
cannot transform the leaven,
knows not how to fashion
for the beloved,
captive in the cage of the dead,
a yearning bed of love, a tress and two arms.
Whoever dies is dead, Orpheus,
and Time galloping in your eyes
stumbles;
and in your hands
the lyre breaks.
I glimpse you now: ahead
on the banks;
A GRAVE FOR NEW YORK
1
So far,
the Earth has been drawn as a pear -
I mean a breast -
But, nothing between a breast and a grave stone
except a trick of engineering:
NEW YORK
A civilization with four legs; each
direction is murder
and a path to murder,
and in the distance
the moaning of those drowning.
New York
A woman - a statue of a woman,
in one hand raising tatters named liberty
by sheets of paper which we name history,
and in another hand strangulating
a child named the Earth.
New York
A body with the colour of asphalt. Around its waist
a damp belt; its face a closed window... I said: Walt
Whitman will open it - I utter the original password -
but no one hears it except a god no longer in his place. The
prisoners, the slaves, the destitute, the thieves and the
sick flow from his larynx, and no opening, no path. And I said:
Brooklyn Bridge! But it's the bridge linking Whitman
to Wall Street, the leaf of grass to the Dollar leaf...
New York-Harlem
Who is the one approaching in a guillotine of silk?
Who is the one departing in a grave as long as the Hudson?
Explode, O, rites of tears; interlace, O, things of weariness. Blueness,
yellowness, roses, jasmine;
the light is sharpening its pins, and in the pricking
the sun is born. O, wound, hidden between the thigh
and the thigh, have you blazed? Has the bird of death
visited you, have you heard the last throes? A rope, and
the neck entwines the gloom,
and in the blood the melancholy of the hour.
New York-Madison-Park Avenue-Harlem
Laziness like work, work like laziness. The hearts are
stuffed with sponge, the hands are blown with reeds.
From the piles of dirt and the masks of Empire State
rises history, odours dangling sheet upon sheet:
Not the sight is blind, but the head,
not the words are bare, but the tongue.
New York- Wall Street-25th Street-Fifth
Street
A Medusian ghost rises between the shoulder and the shoulder.
A market for slaves of all races. People living
like plants in glass gardens. Wretched, invisible creatures
penetrate the texture of space like dust - spiral victims.
The sun is a funeral wake
and daylight a black drum.
2
Here,
On the mouldy side of the rock of the world,
nobody sees me except a black man on the point
of being murdered or a bird on the point of dying;
I thought:
A plant inhabiting a red vase was metamorphosing
as I moved away from the threshold; and I read
of mice in Beirut and elsewhere swaggering
in the silk of a white house, armed with paper
and gnawing at people;
of remnants of pigs in the orchard of the alphabet
trampling over poetry.
And I saw:
Wherever I was-
Pittsburgh (International Poetry Forum),
Johns Hopkins (Washington), Harvard
(Cambridge- Boston), Anne Arbor (Michigan-
Detroit), Foreign Press Club, The Arab Club
at the United Nations (New York), Princeton,
Temple (Philadelphia),
the Arab map a horse dragging its steps
while Time
dangled loose like a saddle towards the grave
or towards the darkest shades, towards the dead fire
or towards a dying fire, revealing the chemistry
of the other dimension in Karkuk, al-Dhahran and the rest of such fortresses in
Arab Afro-Asia. And here is the world
ripening in our hands. Heh! We prepare the Third War and establish
the first, second, third and fourth bureaux in order to make sure that:
1- on that side, there is a jazz party,
2- in this house, there is a person who owns nothing
but ink,
3- in this tree, there is a bird singing;
and in order to declare that:
1- space is measurable by cages or walls,
2- time is measurable by ropes or whips,
3- the system that constructs the world begins by murdering
the brother,
4- the moon and the sun are two coins glittering under
the throne of the sultan.
And I saw
Arab names across the width of the Earth more tender
than eyes, shining but as a lost star shines,
a star who has no ancestors, and whose roots are
in his footsteps....
Here,
On the mouldy side of the rock of the world I know, I confess.
I remember a plant which I call life or my country, death
or my country- a wind that freezes like a cloak, a face that
murders play, an eye that dismisses light;
and I invent your contrary, O, my country,
I descend into your Hell and scream:
I extract a poisonous elixir for you and
resurrect you.
And I confess: New York, in my country the colonnade is yours
and the bed, the chair and the head. And everything is
up for sale: daylight and night, the Stone of Mecca and the
waters of the Tigris. And I announce: Despite that, you pant-
racing, in Palestine, in Hanoi, in the North and South, the
East and West, against figures who have no history but fire.
And I say: Ever since John the Baptist, each of us has carried
his severed head on a platter, awaiting the second birth.
3
Crumble, O, statues of liberty, O, nails
planted in breasts
with a wisdom that emulates the wisdom of roses.
The wind is once more blowing from the East, uprooting tents
and skyscrapers. And there are two wings inscribing:
Another alphabet rises in the topography
of the West,
and the sun is the daughter of a tree
in the orchard of Jerusalem.
Thus I set my flames ablaze. I start anew, formulating
and defining:
New York
A woman of straw, and the bed is swinging from void to void
and here is the ceiling rotting:
each word is a sign of falling; each movement
is an axe or a spade. And to the right and left are bodies
which desire to alter love sight hearing smell touch
and alter alteration itself- opening Time like a gate they break
and improvising the remaining hours
sex poetry ethics thirst utterance silence
and negating all locks. I said: I'll tempt Beirut,
- Seek action. The Word is dead, others ssay.
The Word has died because your tongues have given up
the habit of speaking for the habit of mumbling.
The Word? You wish to reveal its fires? Then, write. I say: Write.
I do not say: Mumble. Nor do I say: Copy. Write - From the
Gulf to the Ocean I hear no tongue, I read no Word. I hear
noises. That is why I glimpse nobody hurling fires.
The Word is the lightest of things; yet it carries all things.
Action is a direction and a moment, but the Word is all directions
and all Time. The Word- the hand, the hand- the dream:
I discover you, O, fire,
you my capital,
I discover you, O, poetry.
And I tempt Beirut. She wears me and I wear
her. We wander
like a ray asking: Who reads? Who sees? The
Phantoms are for Dayan, and the oil flows to its destination.
God is truthful, and Mao has not been wrong: weapons are a very
important factor in war, but not decisive. Man, not weapons, is
the decisive factor; there is no final victory or final defeat.
I repeated these proverbs and aphorisms, as an Arab does,
in Wall Street where rivers of gold of all colours
flow coming from the sources. Amongst them I saw
Arab rivers carrying millions of dismembered limbs
as sacrifices and offerings to the Master Idol. And between
each sacrifice and the next, sailors were cackling as they rolled out
of the Chrysler Building returning to the sources.
Thus, I set my flames ablaze.
We dwell in black fury
that our lungs may fill
with the air of history.
We rise in black eyes fenced like cemeteries
in order to defeat the eclipse.
We travel in the black head in order to march
abreast
of the approaching sun.
4
New York
O, woman crouching in the arch of the wind,
a form farther than the atom,
a dot trotting in the space of numbers,
one thigh in the sky, another in the water,
say where your star is. The battle is approaching
between the grass and electronic brains. The whole of life is hung
on a wall, and here is the bleeding . At the apex is a head joining
the pole to the pole, in the middle is Asia
and at the bottom the feet of an invisible body.
I know you, O, corpse swimming in the musk of poppies,
I know you, O, game of the breast and the breast. I gaze
at you and dream of snow, gaze at you and wait for autumn.
Your snow carries the night; your night carries people
as dying bats. Each wall in you is a cemetery, each day
is a black digger
carrying a black loaf a black platter,
and with them plotting the history of
the White House:
A-
There are dogs that interlock like cuffs. Cats which
beget helmets and chains. And in the alleys which sneak
on the backs of rats, white guards procreate
like mushrooms..
B -
A woman ambles behind her dog; he is saddled like
a horse and has the stride of a king; around him
the city crawls like an army of tears. And where children
and old men covered by black skin pile, the innocence
of bullets grows like grass and terror strikes at the
breast of the city.
C-
Harlem - Bedford Stuyvesant: Sands of people congeal
into tower after tower. Faces weave the times. Refuse is feasts
for children, children are feasts for rats... in everlasting
festivities for another Trinity: the Tax Collector- the Policeman-
the Judge- The authority of devouring, the sword of annihilation.
D -
Harlem (Blacks detest Jews).
Harlem (Blacks dislike Arabs when they remember
the slave trade),
Harlem - Broadway (People enter as molluscs in alembics
of alcohol and drugs).
Broadway - Harlem, a fair of chains and cudgels, and policemen
are the germ of Time. One bullet, ten pigeons. Eyes are boxes
undulating with red snow and Time is a limping crutch. To tiredness, O, olden
negro, O, infant negro. To tiredness again and again.
5
Harlem
I have not come from outside: I know your rancour, know
its tasty bread. Famine has nothing but the sudden thunder, prisons
have nothing but the thunderbolt of violence. I glimpse your fire
progressing under the asphalt in hose pipes and masks,
in piles of refuse which the throne of the cold air embraces
in outcast footsteps wearing
the history of the wind as shoes.
Harlem
Time is in the throes of death and you are the hour:
I hear tears roaring like volcanoes.
I glimpse mouths gobbling people as they gobble bread.
You are the eraser to erase the face of New York.
You are the tempest to grip it like a leaf and hurl it.
New York IBM + SUBWAY coming from mud and crime travelling to mud and crime.
New York = A hole in the Earth's crust out of which
madness gushes river after river.
Harlem
New York is in the throes of death and you are the hour.
6
Between Harlem and Lincoln Center,
I moved along, a number lost in a desert
covered by the teeth of a black dawn.
There was no snow, there was no wind.
I was like someone following a ghost (the face is no face
but a wound or tears; the figure is no figure but a dry rose)
a ghost - (Is it a woman? A man? A woman-man? ) carrying bows
in its chest and lurking in ambush for space. A deer
passed by and he called it the Earth. A bird appeared and he
called it the moon. And I learnt that he was running in order
to witness the resurrection of the Red Indian...in Palestine
and its sisters,
space was a ribbon of bullets,
and the Earth a murdered screen.
And I felt I was an atom rippling in a mass
rippling towards the horizon, horizon, horizon.
And I descended into valleys elongating and running parallel.
And it occurred to me to doubt the roundness of the Earth...
And in the house was Yara,
Yara is the end of a second Earth
and Ninar
is another end.
I placed New York in brackets and walked in a parallel city.
My feet were laden with streets, the sky was a lake in which
swam the fishes of the eye and the conjectures and the animals of
the clouds. The Hudson was fluttering like a crow wearing the body
of a nightingale. Dawn approached me, a child moaning and
pointing to its wounds. I called the night, but it answered not.
It carried its bed and surrendered to the pavement. Then
I saw it covering itself with a wind than which nothing was more
tender except the walls and the pillars... A scream, two
screams, three... And New York started like a half frozen
frog leaping in a pool without water.
Lincoln,
That is New York: leaning on the crutch of old age
and sauntering in the gardens of memory, while all things tend
towards artificial flowers. And while I stare at you, amongst
the marble in Washington, and see your double in Harlem, I
think: When will the time of your imminent revolution come?
My voice rises: Liberate Lincoln from the whiteness of marble,
from Nixon, from the guard-dogs and hunting dogs. let him read
with new eyes the leader of the Zenj, 'Ali b. Muhammad; Let him
read the horizon read by Marx, Mao Tse - tung, and al-Niffari, that divine
madman who made the Earth so slender and permitted it to dwell between the word
and the allusion. And let him read what Ho Chi Minh desired to read, 'Urwa b.
al-Ward:
I divide my body into many bodies..., 'Urwa didn't know
Baghdad, and he might have refused to visit Damascus. He stayed
where the desert was another shoulder bearing with him the burden
of death. He left for those fond of the future a portion of the sun soaking in
the blood of a deer he used to call: " My darling! He
arranged with the horizon to be his last abode.
Lincoln
That is New York: a mirror reflecting nothing but Washington.
And this is Washington: a mirror reflecting two faces-
Nixon and the weeping of the world. Enter into the dance
of weeping; rise up there's still a place still a role... I adore the dance of
weeping which becomes a dove that becomes a flood. The Earth is in need of a
flood.
I said weeping but I meant wrath. I also
meant the questions:
How do I persuade al-Ma'arra to accept Abu al-'Ala; the plains of the
Euphrates the Euphrates? How do I replace the helmet
with the ear of corn? (The daring to hurl other questions at the Prophet and The
Book is imperative),
I say as I glimpse a cloud adorning itself with a necklace of fire;
I say as I behold people streaming like tears.
7
New York
I squeeze you between the word and the word; I grab you
roll you write you and erase you. Hot, cold and in between;
wakeful, slumbering and in between. I crouch over you and
sigh I lead you and teach you how to walk behind me. I crush
you with my eyes, you, the one crushed by terror. I try to command
your streets: Lie down between my thighs and I'll grant you
another space; and your things: Clean yourself and I'll give
you new names.
I could find no difference between a body with a head
bearing branches which we call a tree, and a body with
a head bearing thin threads which we call a person.
I confuse a stone with a car; a pair of shoes in a shop window
appears to be a policeman's helmet, and a loaf of bread a sheet of zinc.
Yet, New York is not nonsense; it is a Word.
But when I write: 'Damascus' I don't write a word but mimic
nonsense. D.A.M.A.S.C.U.S. ...still a noise, I mean a rush of
wind. It once emerged out of ink never to return. And Time is standing guard at
the threshold asking: When does it return, when does it enter?
Thus are Beirut Cairo Baghdad, total nonsense like motes of
the sun...
One sun, two suns, three, a hundred.
(So- and -so wakes up, his eyes filled with
tranquillity
mixed with anxiety. He leaves his wives and children
and goes out carrying his shotgun. One sun, two suns, three,
one hundred...here he is like a string defeated
curling under himself. He sits in a cafe. The cafe is crowded with
stones and toys which we call men, with frogs vomiting words
and covering the seats with filth. ) How can so - and -so rebel when
his brain is filled with his blood, his blood is filled
with chains?
I ask you, who say to me,
I know no science, I specialize in the chemistry of the Arabs.
8
Mrs. Browning, a Greek in New York. Her
house is a leaf
in the book of the Mediterranean. Merein, Ni'matulla, Yves Bonnefoy.
And I am a desultory figure saying unsayable things.
Cairo was scattered among us like roses oblivious to all times.
Alexandria mingled with the voices of Cavafy and Seferis.
This is a Greek icon... She said, as Time stuck to her
lips like a red perfume. Time was arching its back, and snow
was leaning on its elbow, (midnight of April 6, 1971).
And in the morning I rose screaming
just before the hour of returning: New York!
You mix children with snow and bake the cake of the age.
Your voice is an oxide, a post - chemistry poison, and your name
is insomnia and suffocation. Central Park prepares feasts
for its victims, and under the trees lurk the ghosts of
corpses and daggers. The wind has only the bare twigs
and the traveller only the blocked roads.
And in the morning I rose screaming: Nixon,
how many children
have you murdered today?
- This is a trivial matter, (Calley)
- It's true that this is a problem. But iisn't it also true
that this reduces the number of the enemy? (An American
general).
How do I give New York's heart another size?
Does the heart also extend its boundaries?
New York - General Motors - Death.
We shall replace men by fire! (McNamara) - They dry the sea
in which the revolutionaries swim and Where they turn the
land into desert, they call that peace! (Tacitus).
And I rose before dawn and roused Whitman.
9
Walt Whitman
I glimpse letters to you fluttering in the streets of Manhattan.
Each letter is a wagon loaded with cats and dogs. To cats and dogs is the 21st
century; and to people annihilation:
This is the American Age !
Whitman
I didn't see you in Manhattan and I saw everything. The moon
was a husk hurled through the windows, and the sun an electric
orange. And when a black road, a road with
the roundness of a moon leaning on its eyelashes, leapt out of
Harlem, behind the road a light splintered all over the asphalt
and sank away like grass as it reached Greenwich
Village, that other Latin Quarter, I mean the word you get
when you take the word hub and add a dot under the h **.
(I recall that I wrote this in the Viceroy restaurant in London, when I had
nothing but ink, and the night was growing like the down of birds.)
Whitman
The clock announces the hour . (New York- women are piles
of refuse, and refuse is a time sliding towards ash ) .
The clock announces the hour (New York- The system is Pavlov, and people are for
experiments... where the war the war the war !).
The clock announces the hour . (A letter coming from the East.
A boy has written it with his arteries. I read it: The doll is
no longer a dove. The doll is a field gun, a machine - gun,
a shotgun... corpses in roads of light connecting
Hanoi with Jerusalem, and Jerusalem with the Nile.)
Whitman
The clock announces the hour, and I
see what you saw not and know what you knew not.
I move in a vast expanse of cans
crowding like yellow crabs
in an ocean made up of millions of islands-
persons; each is a column with two
hands, two feet and a broken head. And you
O, criminal, exile, immigrant,
nothing more now than a hat worn by birds
which the skies of America do not know !
Whitman, let it be our turn now. I forge a ladder out of my stares;
weave my footsteps as a pillow, and we shall wait.
Man does die but he is more lasting than the grave.
Let it be our turn, now. I await the Volga to run between
Manhattan and Queens; I await the Hwang Ho to flow
into the mouth where the Hudson flows. Baffled?
Didn't the Orantes use to flow into the Tiber? Let it be
our turn, now. I hear tremors and shelling. Wall Street and
Harlem meet - Paper meets with thunder, dust with gusts.
Let it be our turn, now. Oysters are building their nests in the
waves of history. The tree knows its name, and there are holes
in the skin of the world, a sun changes the mask and the ending
and weeps in a black eye. Let it be our turn, now.
We can spin faster than a wheel, split the atom
and float in an electronic brain fading or glittering,
empty or full, and find a homeland in the bird.
Let it be our turn, now.
There is a little, red book ascending, not the stage
which decayed under the words, but that which has been
expanding and growing, the stage of wise madness
and the rain which awakes in order to inherit the sun. Let it
be our turn, now. New York is a rock rolling over the forehead
of the world. Her voice is in your clothes and mine, her charcoal
dyes your limbs and mine...I can see the end, but how do I
seduce Time to let me live to witness. Let it be our turn,
now. And let Time float in the waters of this equation:
New York + New York = The grave or anything emerging from the grave,
New York - New York = The Sun.
10
At eighty I commence eighteen. I said this I
say and repeat,
but Beirut doesn't hear.
A corpse is this, which identifies the complexion with the
garment.
A corpse is this, which stretches as a book not as ink.
A corpse is this, which doesn't live in the grammar
and morphology of the body.
A corpse is this, which reads the Earth as a stone not as a river.
(Yes, I love proverbs and aphorisms, at times:
If you are not infatuated, you are a corpse) .
I say and repeat:
My poetry is a tree, and between the branch and the branch,
the leaf and the leaf, there is nothing but the motherhood
of the trunk.
I say and repeat:
Poetry is the rose of the wind. Not the
wind, but the windward,
not the orbiting but the orbit.
Thus I abrogate the RULE, and establish a rule for each moment.
Thus I approach but don't exit. Exit never
to return.
And move towards September and the waves.
Thus I carry Cuba on my shoulders and ask in New York: When
will Castro arrive? And between Cairo and Damascus
I wait on the road leading to...
...Guevara encountered freedom.
They sank together into the bed of Time and slumbered.
When he woke up he found her not.
He abandoned sleep
and entered the dream,
in Berkeley, in Beirut and the rest of the cells,
where everything prepares itself to become everything else.
Thus,
between a face tending towards marijuana,
carried by the screen of night,
and a face tending towards IBM, carried by a cold sun,
I sent the Lebanon flowing, a river of wrath.
On one bank rose Jubran,
and Adonis on the other.
And I exited from New York as I exit from a bed:
The woman was an extinguished star and the bed
was breaking into trees without a space,
into a limping air,
into a cross with no memory of thorns.
And now,
in the carriage of the first water, the carriage
of the images which wound Aristotle and Descartes I am strewn
between Ashrafiyya and Ras Beirut, between Zahrat al-Ihsan
and the Hayek and Kamal Press, where writing turns
into a palm tree and the palm tree into a dove.
Where the Thousand and One Nights procreate,
while Buthaina and Laila vanish.
Where Jamil travels between the stone and the stone
and nobody has the fortune to find Qais.
But, peace to the rose of darkness and sand
peace to Beirut.
THE STATE OF A VEIL
When the sun opens its bedchamber
for the evening,
the sea gulls appear woven as a veil
over the face of the sky.
THE STATE OF OLD AGE
Whenever I say:
I have aged,
and the wounds have worn me out,
a tempest shakes me,
and the morning
attires me
in its youthful countenance.
A SONG TO THE WOUND
Ahmad, Maryam, Karim-
Death has landed in their courtyard,
hunting their dreams,
hunting the last things
born in the waters of their dreams.
But I, the narrator,
will relate to you what I have seen
on the other bank:
Every day they sing to the sun
to alight from its saddle
and come to repose in their shade.
The sun has fallen in love
with the arches of their eyelids,
fallen in love with their kuhl,
with the colour of their henna.
And I see the sun-
It gathers all its grapes and pours them
into their wine barrels,
drop after drop .
And I say - I, the narrator:
Time weaves its steps from their dismembered bodies,
and paves their dismembered bodies as paths for their steps.
It is playfulness- a child, the dice of the winds.
And for them is that which impregnates
the trunk of the evening
with the sap of dawn.
And for them are these fields;
for them all this impregnation.
A SONG TO A PEASANT
A helmet?
Your claim is a lie.
This is the last of the oranges
which used to inhabit his grove.
THE BEGINNING OF NAMING
We named the olive trees 'Ali,
the street an opening to the sun,
the wind a passport,
and the road a bird.
TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE LOVER
1-
Her name was walking silently in the
forests of letters.
The letters were arches and velvet-like animals,
an army fighting with tears and wings.
The air was kneeling down and the sky stretched out like hands.
Suddenly,
a strange plant leafed and the brook standing behind the forests
drew closer.
I saw fruits embracing like links of a chain;
flowers began to dance,
forgetting their feet and fibres,
shielding themselves with shrouds.
The arms, the muscles, the faces were the remains
of a feast for a day which had ailed and died,
and for guests whose names had not yet been born...
(I saw a procession of white horses
mounting the sky, so I ran shouting: A snake is chasing me. And I repeated,
screaming: A snake as long as a palm tree...
But the procession of horses didn't hear
me and hurried away .
I said: I'll take a horse and escape.
I implored, but only to realize that I had no voice.
I tied my waist with the wind of trepidation and splintered in the air.
A sheikh with a pleasant fragrance
appeared in my way.
- Can you protect me from this snake?
- I am weak ; it is stronger than I am. Along the way there is somebody who
will protect you. Hurry .
I hurried until I reached the air .
The sky stared at me appearing and disappearing in the darkness,
the wind pronounced me and repeated me.
I heard the shiekh's voice from afar:
Ahead of you is a mountain full of the gifts of life. There you have a gift
that will support you and protect you.
And I heard a voice rising out of the mountain:
Lift your veils and behold.
I turned and found the mountain full of windows;
the windows were mothers and children.
In a state of shock, I looked . A baby girl was in tears, saying:
This is my father, pointing to the snake ; the snake slithered away.
A hand stretched towards me.
It pulled me and took me into a place the age of which I didn't know.
There was a bed waiting for me. At its end sat a ghost rising like a breast,
wearing a buttock and a chest and whatever else.)
My body awakened and fell captive to the
pores the eyeballs the navels and the second nature in which procreate
various kinds of poppies and mandragora* and suchlike plants of masculinity
and femininity.
And my skin began to prepare itself for the fall of another planet into its
folds.
- 2 -
In all directions you grow;
you grow in the direction of the depths.
You unfold for me like a spring,
and like a tree you surrender.
And I
was entangled in the towers of dream,
drawing around them my forms,
inventing secrets with which to fill the holes of days.
Upon your limbs I carved the embers of
my limbs .
Upon my lips and fingers I wrote you,
and I engraved you upon my forehead.
I varied the lettering and the spelling,
and multiplied the readings.
My sighs were clouds propping up the
horizon,
a garment which I wove for you to wear,
dyed with the sun.
The night was a light
leading my body
in your direction.
In the folds of your dress I hid,
escorting you to school.
Our steps stole the bells of the
threshold,
and in we sneaked .
In the classroom I sat to your left,
and slept between your eyelids;
but I saw you not.
In a journey that never reached us,
you were.
Your garments were the regions,
and the seasons
your road to me.
On tree trunks we read our name,
with stones we rolled.
The trees, like us, were voices,
and the soil was a fruit
under our glow.
We walked in the company of a cloud,
chatted to the houses,
daylight walking behind us,
draped in grass.
Then towards Qasyun you rose
like a cloud of incense,
and in your smoke I staggered,
intimate, obedient, imbued with your bashful flavour,
- 3 -
Liber, Libera, Phallus ...
A thread of dawn bitter on the eye wakes
us.
Tighten the knot of the eyelids.
In our bodies light hoists its hills and banners,
and flames ripple pillow after pillow.
Tighten the knot of the eyelids.
Daylight announces the night - Wake up.
I penetrate the ship of my body to reach
you,
I explore the tenebrous landscape on the map of sex,
and I advance.
I drape my corridors in signs and talismans ,
then burn for them the incense of my jungle - like hallucinations,
of tattoos and fire.
I see myself as a wave and see you as a shore.
Your back is half a continent,
and under your breasts
my four directions.
I branch out around you,
and between you and me I fall,
an eagle
with a thousand wings.
I hear your delirious limbs,
I hear the sigh of the waist
and the greetings of the hips.
The moment overcomes me.
I enter the desert of trepidation, calling your name,
descending into the fathomless layers
in the presence of the narrowest world.
I witness tears and fire on a single plate,
witness the city of marvels.
And my states become intoxicated.
Thus speaks the body the lord.
O, woman inscribed by the lover's pen,
saunter wherever you desire amongst my limbs.
Halt and speak.
My body splits open,
and my treasures cascade .
Dislodge my fixed stars,
and lie beneath and over my clouds,
in the depths of streams
and on the peaks of mountains.
The days of the year assemble round me.
I transform them into abodes and beds,
and enter
each abode and every bed.
I gather the sun and the moon,
and the hour of love rises.
I immerse myself in a river which flows
out of you
to another Earth.
I hear words
turning into gardens and stones, wave after wave,
and flowers with divine thorns.
Thus speaks the body the lord.
High high high.
Be my face which rises out of every
face,
a sun that rises not in the East,
and sets not in the West.
And do not awaken,
nor fall asleep...
I ascend to you
while descending to you,
gathering the extremes of my anguish and its distant regions,
attacking you with my heart,
and telling the hissing temptations to take me
to roam over each cell in your body.
You erect your bed,
or make the earth your mattress .
We plant the trees of the body,
and take our voices as quilts,
until it is time for revelation.
The body has been estranged,
touched by the magic of transformation.
The ache of the joints, the pulsing of the limbs,
the architecture of the muscles,
and the grandeur of action,
protracting contracting expanding,
the slopes of the body its rises planes expanses
and meanderings,
the land of the loins is bedecked with stars,
and its halves with volcanoes of white embers,
with waterfalls of wildness and desire.
Then we seek the shade of the pavilion
of the pelvis,
where the planet of sex spins.
The metamorphosis is now complete:
Your breasts are day and night.
Thus speaks the body the lord.
- 4 -
Liber, Libera, Phallus ..
Love is upon the sea,
the sea upon the back of the wind.
And the entire world
is a letter in the book of the body.
- What have you seen?
- A knight saying: Never have you desired anything without it being.
I took grains of wheat and sowed them. I said unto them: Grow,
and they grew. I said unto them: Be harvested, and they were harvested. I
said unto them: Be husked, and they were husked . I said unto them: Be
ground, and they were ground. And I said unto them: Be baked, and baked they
were.
When I saw that I never desire anything without it being,
I was filled with awe and awoke . I found you on my pillow.
And you, what have you seen ?
- A wind full of comets of fire; behind the comets were children driving
them.
- What else?
- A hill moving and splitting open to let a pregnant deer emerge.
- What else have you seen ?
- We were together in a boat; you were pregnant. While we embraced tenderly,
the boat capsized and broke up . We escaped over one of its boards; and on
the board you had your child.
And you implored: I am thirsty. I said: From where when we are in this
state? I raised my eyes to the sky ; there was a ghost extending a jug to me
; I grabbed it, gave you a drink and drank; the water was more luscious than
honey. Then I saw the ghost vanish, saying: I left my love to his love
and he gave me a home in the air.
Ambitious like the horizon is my body,
and palm trees are my limbs.
You fruit in me,
and under your breasts I am harvested.
I wither, and you are my basil and water.
Each fruit is a wound and a path to you.
I cross you and you are my abode.
I dwell in you and you are my waves.
A sea is your body, and each wave is a sail.
A spring is your body,
and each fold is a dove singing my name.
You squeeze my limbs into your body.
In your body I move in waves of intoxication,
I am gripped by fear, yet I dare.
To the forests I plead for help,
to the wilderness,
to the primordial clay,
I get torn and splinter, descending into the deepest regions of your body,
filled by beings which blaze die out inhale and exhale.
An abyss of your body snatches me.
I ascend,
gathering my heart which is scattered in my ends.
I raise my eyes to you as you call me :
You were so slow, my love, you were so slow.
My body is a tent, and you its poles and ropes.
You were so slow, my love,
you were so slow.
A child beneath my garments shouts: O,
Love, O, Love .
The trees are his lanterns and the air his tower and bells.
His passion flows in the feathers of the wind,
soaring where there are no boundaries,
in the direction of the sky the sky the sky.
Remember
our house standing alone in the fabric of fig and olive groves,
the brook huddled around it, as small as the pupil of the eye?
Remember?
The woods fluttered like butterflies,
and the night was the beginning of the Earth...?
The night...
Deepen the vent of the breast, become the wilderness
and cuddle me.
Then I'll have a history of thunder,
plains which wandering ploughs,
an island of the ink pots of the body,
I string its ends to my death,
and dwell in the beginnings of the letters.
The night...
Amongst the down of your body I pitch my tents.
I quiver,
prepare the provisions for the voyage,
each quiver is a homeland,
and the roads are luminous like my depths.
We bend, tense, meet face to face,
We parallel and interlace,
(I a vestment for you
and you a vestment for me).
The muscles ferment,
the skin acquires the colour of lilac
and the taste of the sea,
where the fathomless waves beckon
and our limbs set sail.
We hear the moaning of the mysterious depths,
and glimpse our veins enshrouding themselves with death.
We arch and stumble.
O, the water the redeemer love,
why the tiredness, why the repose?
O, texture
more tightly woven than water,
O, love.
Weddings weddings.
Not the sun illuminates us, but another magic.
Weddings weddings
which open our faces onto the cities of magic,
and open our frontiers to sex.
The dream is a planet
orbiting under our eyelashes.
O, marvels of the other love in love.
O, dimension which commences
beyond all dimensions.
O, woman,
as I created you, you desired me;
as I wanted you, you flowed into me.
You enter into my rhythm,
you anoint your breasts with my words,
and sink to the fathomless depth of love.
Where I raise my city and live,
we live, and from the depth of things
full of rancour, we proclaim love.
We dream that our eyelashes are inkpots,
and daylight an open book.
Farther than the dream we walked,
farther than the heart we loved.
We said to the one who names:
Don't name us,
and we awakened.
You were a lake,
and I a stem of mandragora
filled by the Earth.
Along your shores I moored,
and your waist was my anchorage.
What tide awaits us?
My breath is as closed as an oyster,
and you are my pearls and my fisherman.
Your face carries my sail,
and between our love and the sky,
the space is too narrow.
I unveil the other face of daylight,
and glimpse the other dimension of night.
At the sea I scream: O, rampant sea,
break like a reed,
and at thunder: Listen.
I ask:
Is love alone a place which death does not reach?
Can the mortal learn love?
And what do I name you, O, death?
Between myself and me there is a
distance
where love lurks, casting its eye on me,
where death lurks, casting its eye on me .
And the body is my baptism.
Out of the depths of mortal being,
I proclaim love.
Liber, Libera, Phallus ...
- How did you marry me?
- I was wild, wandering,, with no peaceful place to repose.
I fell asleep then rose
to find a woman over my pillow.
I remembered Eve and Adam's rib,
and I knew you were my wife.
That day I dreamt of clouds
lifting, for me, like a veil;
then a voice commanded me:
'Choose whatever you desire.'
I chose a black cloud,
and watered you with its sap.
And I said:
' O, body, contract, unfold, appear and disappear.'
And the body contracted, unfolded, appeared and disappeared.
I saw my clothes slide off my body,
and darkness descend over me;
and the world emerged out of me,
shouting as sharp as a bayonet:
'Descend deep, deep into the darkness.'
And I fell into the darkness.
The stones were rays of light, the sands were flowing waters;
and I found you,
and saw myself.
I said:
'I shall stay in the darkness; I won't come out.'
But
the sun arrived and smuggled me.
And I saw everything entering the sun...
But how did you marry me?
- My body was a wind
blowing in your direction,
wearing the colours of the Earth,
and blowing in your direction.
- 5 -
Yesterday,
I closed my door with the first star.
I drew the lonely curtain and slept with her letters.
And now the pillow is wet,
and pregnant are the words.
I dream-
I wash the Earth and make it a mirror,
and around it I erect a wall of clouds, a fence of fire,
and build a dome of tears
mixed by my own hands.
- What have you prepared for me as a
last present?
- My shirt which covered us the day we were wedded,
and I'll descend with you to the grave
to alleviate your pain at the death of love.
I'll mix you with my water
and offer you as a drink to death.
I'll give you my kingdom:
the grave and the freedom of death.
Once, I saw her as a rising sea.
I adored the foam and vowed that the waves would be my neighbours,
in their salt I would stroll with my worries,
while they read to me their echoes.
(You see what lies beneath the skin. Do
you, then, want to reveal the continent of the depths? Let somebody else
discover the continent of the summits.)
THE DEPTHS
(We were a large crowd, men and women,
walking
along the women's road.
Suddenly, a leopard crossed our path.
I said to a man next to me:
Isn't there a knight here to drive this leopard away?
-I do not know, but I know a woman who will.
- Where is she?
He walked; I walked with him to a nearby howdah;
and he called:
Nada; alight and drive this leopard away.
And she replied:
Would your heart be at ease if he saw me,
he being a male and I a female?
Say unto him: ' Nada conveys her greetings
and commands you to clear the way.'
The leopard bowed his head, and
vanished.)
THE DEPTHS
O, friends, why do you desire my hasty
death?
Leave me.
I hear bells in my memory,
and hear in the bells another Earth.
I need another Earth to add new words to my language.
I need
death.
Leave me.
A shell invited me and read to me her verses.
I also read pages of a book she was composing,
which she called The Room of a Shell.
As she read, she revealed her secrets:
I saw an elephant emerging from the horn of a snail.
I saw camels and horses inside oysters
the size of butterflies.
In front of my eyes a creature was born,
half stone, half animal. She pointed to it and whispered:
This is the woman.
Then she said to me in a hushed voice:
Put your ears between my leaves.
And I heard the rhythm of the seasons,
heard the music of a crumbling house,
a house growing while crumbling.
And when I announced my desire to leave,
I heard voices chanting:
Peace unto the shells-
the spiral entrances.
Peace unto the king of the mountains slumbering there.
Peace unto his jingling hooks.
Close up.
My body is a closed room,
my body is a forest and dams and closed canals.
Close up.
Our bodies are angles and narrow covers.
Our bodies are a lock and its key,
and the path to us
is the passion of the plants creeping in the narrow space
between our thighs and eyes,
the passion which induces madness.
Close up.
Our shells remain, even if broken, closed.
Close up.
Tighten the knot of the eyelids.
The colour of our eyelashes -
when we undress, wear our dreams
and hallucinate -
is a closed map...
- 6 -
The sun of the lover dangles, its head
bent by slumber.
The unknown should take the vacation of the harvest .
My face should journey in the spirit of the world.
Do I tear up the Book of Exodus,
incline over my image and read its sand
cast in rings like a suit of armour?
Do I whisper to my garments:
Move on a crutch like a standing figure dreaming,
hang as signs and banners,
in the jungles of the fingers and the neck,
where I get drunk and dazed like sunflowers.?
Do I say to this chair:
Follow me; remain faithful to the weariness
which you have sipped shudder after shudder. ?
Do I remind death of the leaves it forgot
at my place on its last visit?
Between my shells and me rises an arch
of colours and distances,
under which cities can pass and repose.
My shells, too, have their trees and streets,
their festivals and bed chambers .
If the Crab would speak, I would ask it
where it would sleep tonight.
If the sea would sleep,
I would give it a bed
in my abode.
1- A Voice
We leave our heads outside the covenant,
granting each its drugs and ghosts.
Your head is a pillow, mine an erupting volcano.
Then we inscribe the document:
' A woman is a transient home for a man
who is himself a transient home.
A man is the tomorrow of another man,
and a woman the future of another woman.'
Yet, we begin the following page,
we converse with our legs,
with the ink and words of the pores,
and play in their masked corridors.
Suddenly, the roaring flames approach,
and the thunderbolt beckons.
We wake ; each runs after his head,
in the yearning for dwelling and residing
and in the waves of running
after the other homeland,
the lost, the everlasting...
2- Dialogue
Between you and me, there is a veil.
You will never behold me.
How do you hope for openness and revelation?
Death has fallen into your heart, so seek the light of death.
And how do you break the habit?
You jumble and you stumble...
My states have taken no roots in you.
- I am your point of repose.
My sun has baked you.
I wear you as a ring with which
I put a stamp on Time.
3- A Song
The body of the poet
is the body of the child and the crow.
A body in a book,
in the ashes of the curtains,
in the door,
in the stone staying up all night,
between my eyes and the book.
A body in the corners,
in the mirage procreating under the mirrors.
A body travelling farther and farther,
a flying stone which receives or beats the sky.
A body which opens in dreams,
closes at night, stretches between the letters.
A body like the letters.
A body retreating in the forefront of the lines.
A body like a suspended road,
unfolding its leaves and questioning space,
where the echo doesn't know its roles,
where there is nothing on my approaching stage
except the echo and the curtain...
4- A Song
I call you, O, end of the night,
get intoxicated and extend,
become a sorcerer
over my bed.
I call you to say:
What does love say to the lover
at the end of the seasons?
5- A Song
Shahrayar is still
in the peaceful bed, in the gentle room,
in the mirrors of daylight,
wakeful, guarding the tragedy.
The light words have stolen his face
and taught him how to slumber
in the blackness of the lake,
in the blueness of the pebble,
amidst his intimate ruins.
Shahrayar is still
holding his sword,
ready for the harvest,
hugging the jar of the wind
and the urn of ashes.
Shahrazad has forgotten
to illuminate the hidden paths
in the orbit of the veins.
She has forgotten to illuminate
the fissures
between the face of the victim
and the footsteps of Shahrayar.
When the sun opens its
bedchamber
for the evening,
the sea gulls appear woven as a veil
over the face of the sky.
THE STATE OF OLD AGE
Whenever I say:
I have aged,
and the wounds have worn me out,
a tempest shakes me,
and the morning
attires me
in its youthful countenance.
A SONG TO THE WOUND
Ahmad, Maryam, Karim-
Death has landed in their courtyard,
hunting their dreams,
hunting the last things
born in the waters of their dreams.
But I, the narrator,
will relate to you what I have seen
on the other bank:
Every day they sing to the sun
to alight from its saddle
and come to repose in their shade.
The sun has fallen in love
with the arches of their eyelids,
fallen in love with their kuhl***,
with the colour of their henna.
And I see the sun-
It gathers all its grapes and pours them
into their wine barrels,
drop after drop .
And I say - I, the narrator:
Time weaves its steps from their dismembered bodies,
and paves their dismembered bodies as paths for their steps.
It is playfulness- a child, the dice of the winds.
And for them is that which impregnates
the trunk of the evening
with the sap of dawn.
And for them are these fields;
for them all this impregnation.
A SONG TO A PEASANT
A helmet?
Your claim is a lie.
This is the last of the oranges
which used to inhabit his grove.
THE BEGINNING OF NAMING
We named the olive trees 'Ali,
the street an opening to the sun,
the wind a passport,
and the road a bird.
TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE LOVER
1-
Her name was walking silently in the
forests of letters.
The letters were arches and velvet-like animals,
an army fighting with tears and wings.
The air was kneeling down and the sky stretched out like hands.
Suddenly,
a strange plant leafed and the brook standing behind the forests
drew closer.
I saw fruits embracing like links of a chain;
flowers began to dance,
forgetting their feet and fibres,
shielding themselves with shrouds.
The arms, the muscles, the faces were the remains
of a feast for a day which had ailed and died,
and for guests whose names had not yet been born...
(I saw a procession of white horses
mounting the sky, so I ran shouting: A snake is chasing me. And I repeated,
screaming: A snake as long as a palm tree...
But the procession of horses didn't hear
me and hurried away .
I said: I'll take a horse and escape.
I implored, but only to realize that I had no voice.
I tied my waist with the wind of trepidation and splintered in the air.
A sheikh with a pleasant fragrance
appeared in my way.
- Can you protect me from this snake?
- I am weak ; it is stronger than I am. Along the way there is somebody who
will protect you. Hurry .
I hurried until I reached the air .
The sky stared at me appearing and disappearing in the darkness,
the wind pronounced me and repeated me.
I heard the shiekh's voice from afar:
Ahead of you is a mountain full of the gifts of life. There you have a gift
that will support you and protect you.
And I heard a voice rising out of the mountain:
Lift your veils and behold.
I turned and found the mountain full of windows;
the windows were mothers and children.
In a state of shock, I looked . A baby girl was in tears, saying:
This is my father, pointing to the snake ; the snake slithered away.
A hand stretched towards me.
It pulled me and took me into a place the age of which I didn't know.
There was a bed waiting for me. At its end sat a ghost rising like a breast,
wearing a buttock and a chest and whatever else.)
My body awakened and fell captive to the
pores the eyeballs the navels and the second nature in which procreate
various kinds of poppies and mandragora* and suchlike plants of masculinity
and femininity.
And my skin began to prepare itself for the fall of another planet into its
folds.
- 2 -
In all directions you grow;
you grow in the direction of the depths.
You unfold for me like a spring,
and like a tree you surrender.
And I
was entangled in the towers of dream,
drawing around them my forms,
inventing secrets with which to fill the holes of days.
Upon your limbs I carved the embers of
my limbs .
Upon my lips and fingers I wrote you,
and I engraved you upon my forehead.
I varied the lettering and the spelling,
and multiplied the readings.
My sighs were clouds propping up the
horizon,
a garment which I wove for you to wear,
dyed with the sun.
The night was a light
leading my body
in your direction.
In the folds of your dress I hid,
escorting you to school.
Our steps stole the bells of the
threshold,
and in we sneaked .
In the classroom I sat to your left,
and slept between your eyelids;
but I saw you not.
In a journey that never reached us,
you were.
Your garments were the regions,
and the seasons
your road to me.
On tree trunks we read our name,
with stones we rolled.
The trees, like us, were voices,
and the soil was a fruit
under our glow.
We walked in the company of a cloud,
chatted to the houses,
daylight walking behind us,
draped in grass.
Then towards Qasyun you rose
like a cloud of incense,
and in your smoke I staggered,
intimate, obedient, imbued with your bashful flavour,
- 3 -
Liber, Libera, Phallus ...
A thread of dawn bitter on the eye wakes
us.
Tighten the knot of the eyelids.
In our bodies light hoists its hills and banners,
and flames ripple pillow after pillow.
Tighten the knot of the eyelids.
Daylight announces the night - Wake up.
I penetrate the ship of my body to reach
you,
I explore the tenebrous landscape on the map of sex,
and I advance.
I drape my corridors in signs and talismans ,
then burn for them the incense of my jungle - like hallucinations,
of tattoos and fire.
I see myself as a wave and see you as a shore.
Your back is half a continent,
and under your breasts
my four directions.
I branch out around you,
and between you and me I fall,
an eagle
with a thousand wings.
I hear your delirious limbs,
I hear the sigh of the waist
and the greetings of the hips.
The moment overcomes me.
I enter the desert of trepidation, calling your name,
descending into the fathomless layers
in the presence of the narrowest world.
I witness tears and fire on a single plate,
witness the city of marvels.
And my states become intoxicated.
Thus speaks the body the lord.
O, woman inscribed by the lover's pen,
saunter wherever you desire amongst my limbs.
Halt and speak.
My body splits open,
and my treasures cascade .
Dislodge my fixed stars,
and lie beneath and over my clouds,
in the depths of streams
and on the peaks of mountains.
The days of the year assemble round me.
I transform them into abodes and beds,
and enter
each abode and every bed.
I gather the sun and the moon,
and the hour of love rises.
I immerse myself in a river which flows
THE TIME
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
What blood is this that flows across the sand,
what eclipse is this?
Tell us, O, flame of the present,
what shall we say?
The tatters of history fill my larynx
and on my countenance the signs
of the victim.
How bitter language has now become,
and how narrow the door of the alphabet.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
..../ A friend turned executioner? A neighbour said:
How slow is Hulago? Who is knocking ?
A ransom collector?
Give him the dues..
Shapes of women and men...walking images/
We gestured
and exchanged whispers,
our footsteps a string of murder/
Does your murder beget your God
or your God beget your murder?
- The riddle has confused him,
so he bent,
an arch of terror over his drooping days.
- I have lost a brother, my father has
gone insane,
and my children have died.
Whose help do I invoke? Do I hug the door?
Complain to a carpet?
- He is dazed ; bring the urn and grant him recovery
with the snuff of the Ayatullahs.
Corpses which the murderer reads as
anecdotes,
heaps of bones.
Is this mass a child's head, or a piece of charcoal?
Is what I see a body or a skeleton of clay?
I bow down, patch up two eyes, and stitch up a flank.
Guessing may assist me
and the light of memory may guide me.
But in vain I read the tenuous thread,
in vain I assemble a head, two legs, two arms,
to discover the identity of the victim.
-To whom does the ant offer its lesson?
and why the amazement?
Poetry
is the fusion of this tragic spark with the eye;
and a trance it is
to see your house raised to God in fragments.
The owl of a clairvoyant shrieks on top of a minaret,
weaving its voice as a rainbow,
and crying, throttled, to the point of joy.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire.
..../ The fool reveals his secrets:
This rebellious time is a jeweller's shop,
and a mire of prophets.
The fool reveals his secrets:
The truth will be death;
death the bread of poets
and that which is called, or has become, the homeland
is nothing but a time floating on the surface of Time.
The fool reveals his secrets:
Where is your key, O, splendour of the flood?
Please submerge me,
and take the last of my shores, take me.
I'm enthralled by fathomless seas ablaze,
enthralled by a burning straw,
by roads which startle all roads.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire.
My soul has forgotten the things of its passion,
forgotten its legacy, preserved in the house of images.
It no longer remembers what the rain pronounces,
what the ink of trees inscribes;
no longer paints anything
but a sea gull flung by the waves onto the ropes of a ship;
it no longer hears anything
but iron screaming: Here is the city's breast,
a moon is ruptured, tied to the umbilical cord
of a ghoul of sparks;
it no longer knows that God and the poet
are two children
slumbering on the cheek of a stone.
My soul has forgotten the things of its passion.
Therefore, the shadow -the looming tomorrow- terrorizes me;
therefore doubts encompass me,
and the dream resists me.
Chained, I run from one fire to another.
I have plunged under the sweat flowing out of my body,
shared with the walls
the night insomnia/(the steps of night are beasts...)
And many a time I have said to poetry,
lying heavy at the bottom of my memory:
What is the saw that presses on my neck,
dictating the Verse of silence ?
To whom do I narrate my ashes
when I don't know how to tear the pulse and flick it over a table,
when I refuse to make my sorrow a drum for the sky.
Then, let me confess:
My life has been no more
than a mill of the wind and a house of phantoms.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of flames:
The trees of love in Qassabin have brothered
the trees of death in Beirut.
And here is the forest of basil consoling
the forest of exile .
As Qassabin enters the map of grass,
and distils the entrails of the plains,
Beirut enters the map of death/
graves like orchards - the dismembered limbs
are fields.
What is it that spills Qassabin in Saida or in Sur,
when it is Beirut that is spilling?
What is it that in its distance draws so close?
What is it that mixes in my map
all these bloods?
....Summer has withered; autumn has not
arrived;
spring is blackened in the memory of the earth/
winter is as death paints it: bleeding or in the throes of death .
A time emerges out of the flask of predestination
and the palm of fate;
a time of wandering which improvises Time
and ruminates the air.
How, and from where do you hope to know
this faceless murderer /who wears all faces...
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
Exhausted, I turn now and gaze into the distance-
What are these rags?
Histories? Countries? Banners on the cliff of dusk?
Here, in the instant I read whole
generations,
and in the corpse I read a thousand corpses.
Here, the fathomless waves of absurdity submerge me,
my body breaks loose out of my control,
my face is no longer in its mirrors
and my blood shies away from its arteries...
Is it because I don't see the light which transports my dreams to it?
Is it because I am a distant extreme
of the universe
which all others bless while against it I blaspheme ?
What is it that uproots my depths and proceeds
through jungles of desire, countries- oceans of tears
and dynasties of symbols,
through races and nations- centuries and peoples?
What is it that separates my self from my self?
What is it that destroys me, negates me?
Am I a crossroad?
Is my path no longer my path
at the moment of revelation?
Am I more than one person, my history my cliff of falling,
and my rendezvous my fire?
What is it that rises in the cackle
rising out of my suffocating limbs?
Am I more than one person, each asking the other:
Who are you? And from where ?
Are my limbs jungles of conflicts
.....in a blood which is a wind and a body which is a leaf?
Is it madness? Who am I in this
darkness?
Teach me and guide me, O, madness.
Who am I, my friends, the clairvoyant and oppressed?
I wish I could break out of my skin.
not knowing who I was or who I will be.
I am searching for a name and something to name,
while nothing can be named.
A blind time, and a blinded history.
A time of mud, and a history of wreckage.
And the one who owns is owned /
So, bless you, bless you,
O, darkness.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
My Semitic grandfather is gripped by what blind fate begets.
A parrot, or a prophet poured into a mummy?
O, grandfather, whose path I now desert,
alright; you are the one who dwells in the water germ
and the folds of the heavens;
and it is wise of you to walk, as you do, proudly backwards;
you are the secret and the kingdom stuffed
with prophecies-
and I am the one incapable of comprehending you.
I am the one who strayed, and you are the miracle.
O, grandfather, whom I now reject,
and in whose creative name I had loved Creation,
as of now, you will not recognize me;
nothing will relate me to you
except those ruins sedimenting in the depth of my soul
lamenting me, and making me lament you.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
The end of the age that rained sijjil**
now meets the beginning
of the age that rains oil.
And the god of palms grovels
at the feet of a metallic god .
And between the two gods I am
the spilt blood and retreating caravan,
groping for my dying fire
and trying to cope with my death,
which rages rampantly across its desert.
And I say:
The universe is nothing but what my dreams weave.
.../The threads dissolve,
and I see myself in the void of an abyss,
plummeting into the night of descent.
I see things as wheels of smoke
and see the world as a hunter's game:
The table has been laid, bodies are vegetables, the bowls are heads;
God sits at the table of the hunt:
a deer
which had been a baker,
a lizard
which had been a soldier/
Is it a god devouring the hunt,
or is the hunt devouring the god?
Roads that lie, shores that betray;
how can madness but strike you now?
Thus I desert the eater and the eaten
and seek repose in every space of wandering.
My consolation is that I delve deep into my dream,-
straying afar, and rippling,
singing the lust of rejection,
hallucinating:
" The orbit of Venus is an anklet for my days,
and Capricorn a bracelet."
And I say: "Flowers in their crowns
are balconies..."
My consolation is that I rebel beyond all bounds,
and alert the verbs of rebellion.
Saddle these rampant winds.
History is slain, and slaughtering is only the prelude.
Leave the slaughterer, the slaughtering and the slaughtered
as witnesses,
and cover me with the remains of history, engrave me
as a ruin amongst the ruins.
Thus, I distil wisdom from its purest
source,
shouting, welcome to my ruins, welcome to this eclipse.
Tomorrow death will extinguish me,
but extinguished I will not be.
Tomorrow I 'll exit from one light to another .
It is true that I am more frail than a thread,
but I am more sublime than a god.
Thus I begin,
hugging my land and the secrets of her passions.
Her lover is the body of the sea,
whose arms are the sun .
A body - storehouse of thunder
and anchor of tenderness.
A body - a promise, and I am the one absent in it.
I am the one rising out of this wager.
A body /
Cover the face of the lilies with the light of infatuated rain.
And let it be...
I hug the age to come and walk,
swaggering, as a ship's captain walks,
designing my homeland.
Go
climb its highest peaks,
descend its lowest gorges,
you will find no fear or shackles.
As though the birds were boughs,
the Earth a child, myths were women.
A dream?
I grant to those who come after me
the bliss of inaugurating this space.
My skin isn't a hut of thoughts,
nor is my passion a woodcutter of memories.
My ancestry is that of rejection,
my weddings are the impregnation
between two poles.
And this age is my age:
The dead god, the blind machine.
And my age
is that I inhabit the pool of desires,
that my dismembered limbs are my flowers,
that I am
the alif of water and the ya of fire,*
and that I am
the madman of life.
Revealing to Time the secrets of his passions,
thus he confesses:
He is the one who goes astray,
he is the one who leads astray,
he is the dissenting, the outsider and the differing.
ISHMAEL
Wrapped in my blood I come,
led by raging fires, guided by ruins.
Crowds of people ripple as torrents of tongues:
Each phrase is a king, each mouth is a tribe.
....And I am the one disowned by every tribe.
1
I exited, embraced by wounds
and embracing the murdered Earth,
building my tents in my blood
and telling my name to gather my notebooks
from the house of Ishmael
2
(Ishmael floats,
a desert
3 of dying
books; above him
a moon donning its sabre
and dragging along its camels...)
I search for the guiding sparks / 'The Daughters of the Coffin'*
slumbering in the down of darkness / in their light
I see my face a ladybird, see my death
a bird perching on the shoulder of the dark,
and see the sand improvising speech.
On the east side of the Euphrates the storks
carry the keys of migration,
having destroyed their nests.
And on the West Side a temple rises /
two breasts swelling with chaff.
/...And I am the one disowned by every
tribe.
Here I am, ravished by my own
hands /
my blood at war with my blood;
a body is torn inside a body,
and love is no body; my death is no body.
5
Who are you ?
6 My wreckage
yells at me
and my words are on the verge of denying me.
A fire comes to him from a land which floats
and slumbers under his pillow.
-----------------------------
A fire comes to him from a land
which floats on heads
stuffed with tongues - creatures created by a god who dictates
blood as books, affirms what he wills
for them, and abolishes what he wills .
A fire comes to him from a land which floats,
sparks come close to gripping him.
How can he exit - how can he break the siege?
7
-----------------------------
I said farewell;
I recall a figure crouching in the house of Ishmael
8
stringing a rock to a cloud,
gashing the stars with stones,
living amongst tortoises
which drifted into dreams and went to sleep.
I said farewell/ I recall a howdah
hallucinating
9 with my
lady,
and I recall a nation
hallucinating with the last remains:
A headless beast, crowning itself
a god
throwing its shadow
a homeland like a jester's hat.
(Its shadow
10 is a land
which spreads its fields
as beds, and is guided.....)
I said farewell.
Eclipse engraved itself upon my forehead.
I granted my accent to fragmented time
and granted its accent my certainty.
/ ......And the Earth
11 enters into
metallic coughing /
streets paved with children - offerings,
12
a nation vaunting its throne of bones .
13
-----------------------------
Go, roam around;
thoughts like rotten fishes, a city of tongues
chopped up and trampled over.
Go, roam around,
and ask the roots
how the body of the place draped itself in its beasts;
or ask the crow of the alphabet- Ishmael's body,
(Ishmael is the map of the ages).
Go, roam around/
open a head here, open a thought there.
-----------------------------
You will see an image of your face,
unknown.
You will see your garments on the body of another.
Perhaps you will get ensnared by teeth
which speak the language of angels,
or have the shape of the heavens.
Go, roam around/
You will see pigs transformed by The Book into gazelles.
-----------------------------
...../ And we are afraid to feel the loaf.
And what to say to a murderer
who weaves
blood into pillows ?
14
Who are you, Ishmael ?
15 Your
footsteps bleed
books which snake-charmers collect.
In each letter is a pit,
in each comma a mirage .
Nonsense and the divination of a fable.
You've left me no place near you,
a place where my ink can weave its garments,
that the liberating flames may brother what I feel and say/
You've split me in two,
created a schism between my blood and me -
Who are you, Ishmael?
And how do I see you the moment I don't see you ?
-----------------------------
But Ishmael is a wound,
and I am the comrade of his suffering.
My visions nurture him tenderly,
and I am a letter written to him-
a letter from an insider - an outsider.
-----------------------------
/.... And the Earth enters into
metallic coughing/
Its prophet is Hayy ben Bayy
16 .
The nation has shrivelled and dissolved
in a stream of mud which flows and dissolves
in Hayy ben Bayy.
O, Sun, O, foot of daylight,
you have deserted your night with us,
and forgotten it...
- Who are you?
- A man from Tamim.
" And if a flea on the back of a flea
attacks Tamim,
their crowds will flee."
17
-No, I am not from Tamim.
- Who are you? A Taghlibite?
- No, I'm not a Taghlibite.
18
.../ And the Earth enters into
metallic coughing/
Its prophet is Hayy ben Bayy
19 .
Who are you, Ishmael? Our stage
20 continues
its show.
-" Exalting your glory on high."
The neck of the shell is a priest
who strings Time to his threads,
and tailors a pair of trousers for each moment.
-"Exalting your glory on high".
Who are you, Ishmael?
(It's said that the sun
for you is but a pitcher,
and the Earth is but a plate...)
Are you a magician's fortress,
or a ghoul's head?
-" Exalting your glory on high ".
21
The lung of the ages is ruptured
and the Earth is a weaver's rag.
Wrapped in my blood I walk,
led by raging flames, guided by wreckage.
A festival with which annihilation favours its offsprings,
a festival for Ishmael putting an end to Time.
(Would he, I wonder, inaugurate Time?)
A festival too grand for the place to accommodate .
It is said Ishmael has come, and it is said he has disappeared,
his guests have packed the place:
sects and deities which feast together, eat one another,
- and the words get jumbled.
-----------------------------
- One crowd distributes roses,
celebrating the erection of guillotines .
-The Arab atlas is the skin of an ostrich which defeated another ostrich.
- No victor but He / The saddle of His horse is gold,
and a cloud is His forehead.
-----------------------------
A festival for Ishmael (Ishmael
came and, it is said, he disappeared),
his guests are sects and deities which feast together
and eat one another- divinity mingles with bullets.
Is this the salvation ?
24
I call you, Ishmael; the wine of our
covenant has been served
and the feast of dusk
is in all its glory -
You and I are the servers of wine, and around us
the insects of weapons besieging us
and hatching their eggs...
I call you, Ishmael; I inaugurate
the end: I am not your offspring.
25
Before you, I gave my Paradise its Eve,
and before you, I beheld the face of God .
I call you, Ishmael ; I end what
you began-
I give my feast in the hall of the ages.
I uproot myself from you. (The last sea gull to read the shores
is sitting by my side,
and the first sea gull to write the shores
is sitting by my side) .
I inaugurate the beginning,
creating playfulness like the face of God,
swimming in the waters of the alphabet:
in everything His secret flows;
it's not for the like of Him to be enchanted by His roots,
or to be delimited by an identity .
26
I learn the words anew, I master
their secrets
and say:
My roots are play,
and the boastful swagger of ecstasy-
A revelation which inaugurates every light in fondness,
and makes the earth its bed, as does a stream .
27
And I say: My ancestry is a passion
which was enamoured with space,
and forged its sails out of the body of the air .
Dawn attires me in its bountiful joys,
and each cloud
is a homeland for my love .
28
I also say:
My love learns the words anew,
masters their magic,
and shares with noble grapes
their cunning .
29
The days of my love are trees
impregnated by the seasons-
its hands are dawn -
not the dawn of Ishmael,
but this blood poured out in the cup of words;
not yesterday,
but this wreckage:
corpses, a brother and a brother,
gardens of friends and lovers ;
corpses- promises, the yearning of the absent,
the longing of those living in waiting,
and the passion of a dreamer;
corpses- feasts, their wine is the sky, their savouries are books;
corpses- impossible to tell the butchering sword,
from the butchered neck, from...
corpses-
out of the vapor of their flux rise Suras* which proclaim:
Murder is the beginning ; the murderer is jumbled with his victim;
a house screams: I am a grave;
a poet yells:
My people are a space of blood;
and space confuses space.
Wrapped in my blood, he walks
led by raging fires, guided by ruins:
I walk ahead of words towards their bed
in order to see the lake of their death.
Dusk has said:
I have erected the neck of ash
30
as a bridge to every prophecy .
Dusk has said:
Barren is the body of the city;
I have impregnated it, revealed its sex
to the liberating sap.
Dusk has said:
Had I had a home, I would have invited you
and said to you: 'Here you can believe and disbelieve,
blaspheme or mock or dream.'
and would have had a wider space for your madness,
would have been the most faithful friend.
Dusk has said.
That I may have the bliss of hearing the
voice
whispered by the larynx of dusk,
I've granted my poppies to friendly fields,
and my inkpots to the leaves of the seasons.
I have granted my memory to each wrinkle
in that body which I have called a 'homeland',
and which lives without a homeland.
I've given the tiles of snow my verses
in order to grant them warmth.
I've given the sheikh of the wind a crutch
which my father inherited from his grandfather.
I've given the eyelashes of the winds my windows.
I have given every lover my passion and fire.
I have given Hagar everything a son can give.
I have given Ishmael the prettiest things my childhood knew,
that I may have the bliss of hearing the voice
which the larynx of dusk has whispered.
Dusk;
and Ishmael is entering dusk,
the dictation of a desert,
and your rolling head
is its rhythm.
33
Dusk, and nature rejoices in dusk.
My blood is an ode to dusk.
A willow spreads its tresses
in order to cuddle dusk.
Water deserts its course
in order to witness dusk.
In everything there is a rose leaning
tenderly on the shoulder of dusk.
34
Dusk, and the sky collides with our
steps.
Here I am, shaking hands with a creator
whose fingers have frozen,
giving my language
to the ink of death,
following this light ball of spiders' webs,
and saying: ' My land is a dead lover and a dying lover."
Here; I shall paint on my hands
the luminous planet of dusk,
in order to greet the withering rose I have picked
from the balcony of Time which I have brothered,
and in order to touch its virgin mud,
which will return to the elements their magic,
and say unto language: "Follow me.
This is the beautiful dusk;
its victim inherits its victim.
This is the guiding dusk."
35
Wrapped in my blood I come,
led by a dream, guided by sparkle of light.
I have prepared my house for Ibn Rushd,
for Abu Nuwas and al-Radiyy,
and written to Ta'iy, asking him to come,
and said to Abu'l-Quruh: Abu al-'Ala' has come,
so have Ahmad and Ibn Khaldun.
We shall proclaim the Verse* of the depths,
the hissing of the primordial flux,
and deconstruct the buried language
in the forest of things - shall read a rock
which had remained obscure,
shall hear what a jasmine whispers,
and what flickers in the minds of the fields:
Love is the rose of desire
and poetry the fatiha* of minds.
36
.../And I am the one disowned by every
tribe.
I call you, Ishmael, I complete what I
initiated.
I give my feast in the hall of the ages.
Nothing remains of the body of place but dust /
I hug it as clay,
and as the stroke of a creator-
playfulness which dissolves its balsam in my blood.
With the innocence of play I mingled.
I saw a wing in a stone,
saw my body a rose dictating the book of its nectar,
and saw the universe as ink.
With the innocence of play I
fused.
The images of nature changed.
I said unto playfulness:
Devour my body, take me,
old man of my passions,
luminous sea.
Give me a lap that shares with me
my rampant lust .
You have an image upon whose limbs my limbs are engraved,
and you and I are wrapped in our covenant.
37
And I am fortified by my rampant
passion,
I am my dream ; I inscribe its mysteries
as images which divulge their secrets to me.
I am my body,
and to the body are my supplications.
The dream is the blossom of my feasts,
the dream is my bread and celebrations.
I see as though I were a piece of clay
mixed with dust other than its own.
My body rejoins me to my body,
and my question questions me.
I see as though I've brothered a
fool,
and driven to the water a herd of palms.
38
(If only Ishmael would liberate
himself from himself . )
I have brothered a fool and roamed
astray,
accompanied the fern of ecstasy,
dressed in weeping willows, and said:
" Roses are a lover's tent."
(If only Ishmael would liberate
himself from himself . )
I've brothered a fool
and was the bridge
between one temptation and another.
(If only Ishmael would liberate
himself from himself . )
I've brothered a fool, let Creation dwell under my cloak,
and announced out loud: " The truth should be an ascending path
behind me."
I've brothered a fool in order to
enter the time of eclipse,
and embrace the last rose,
that it may become
the first of the things I say.
39
Whatever there was, there was.
City dwellers and Bedouins- a dictionary of a legend.
(The crow has tended to whiteness/ so - and - so
has written her childhood as an amulet for passion,
and so - and - so has written its history
as an abode for Ishmael- a field of blood) /
I say:
I have given my age to dust,
and entered the womb of eclipse,
a phantom of an emerging history -
I almost hear its steps .
O, image which is to be,
my language and my love,
if you are one, then in your name,
in the name of your passionate yearning,
I am I - and I am other.
(As though Ishmael were tearing
himself from himself . )
It is dusk.
And nature rejoices in dusk.
My blood is a chant for dusk.
A sea ripples as it comes to me,
its waves ablaze, repeating:
This is the beautiful dusk-
Its victim inherits its victim.
This is the guiding dusk.
1-
He walks alone;
he walks ahead of his time.
2-Had Ishmael been a field, I
would have poured my clouds over him,
had he been a tempest, I would have been a horizon for his blasts, would
have been his friend.
3-A desert, a necklace of sand;
the caravans are its string.
4-
In vain do you ask about your friend; he has died.
The house that gave him refuge has died too / dig a road to meet him, in
your lasting heart. But, do you think the heart lasts?
5-
No water knows where my desert is, or how I taste it.
6- I hurl my questions, but find
no answers.
7-The generous trees grant me
their garments
and a star extends its hands to me...
8-
Ishmael's dreams are crouching, his forehead is earth/
Ishmael was nothing but a voice tearing itself, a voice without a space.
9-Tihmaz Bey is still
hallucinating with the murder of his brother and slaughtering anyone who
disagrees.
10-And his shadow has secret
watchdogs and guards.
11-A land of wreckage / a jungle
of tribes and massacres,
a land that crowns our age
as a king on the throne of fables,
a land that heightens the awesomeness of the distance
between our footsteps and our hell.
12-
Slaughterers and executioners sharing the skins of their victims.
13-
Qiriqmaz presented his wife with a bracelet made of a child's bones.
14-
The act of a Sultan; are you a fool or an ignorant fellow to say: No?
15-
Was Ishmael a caravan which would see its beautiful opposite and cull it as
a brother?
Did he use to raise his head as an arch for the procession of his heart
and see the sky as a game for his imagination?
Did the unknown truly guide him to its mysteries, and did love for the sake
of love orbit in his name, reading its dreams in the rites?
Was Ishmael no more than a conjecture, or was he a sin?
16-
Hayy ben Bayy is a machine;
nothing can translate its magic.
17-
Kujuk is sharpening his spears;
he has destroyed the houses to erect his fortresses.
18-Kuzlar Agha said: The money of
the regions belongs to the Prince.
He took the women as spoils of war and bought his position for cash/
Farhad is his young successor.
19-
They brought the last survivors,
brought their legs, and their noses: a fatwa * issued by Tuman...
20-A feast /
Each skull drinks the wine of its love from the belly of a corpse.
21-
Foam../ and Ishmael floats
a cemetery ruminating its dead and pouring its saliva
as elegies.
And the Earth enters into spasms of metallic coughing / its prophet is Hayy
ben Bayy.
22 -
Umayya's citadel has crumbled,
and God feels no sorrow over its misfortunes.
23-
O, house of Hashim, return to your palm trees,
dates have now become so cheap.
If you say: we are the clan of Muhammad,
So are the Christians the clan of Jesus.
24-
Have you been asking about the stars of my tribe?
They've waned/ I like those who wane.
I have come to believe: the wings of hens are angels,
and the sun is the peel of an orange .
I have come to believe: my kind is moss,
and God is a machine.
25-
I uproot myself from him. My family:
a murderer of gods,
a creator of ecstasy,
and a liberator.
26-
What? As though water were my memory / Do I inhabit the heart of a spring?
27-I gave myself my passion, and
forgot myself.
28-I hid my sorrow in a wall, in
our ruined house/ pampered by a sleepless star .
My despair is a mask,
my anger a startled gazelle nurtured by a child.
29-
What does somebody in chains say,
somebody whose book is erased by the prophet
and his tongue erased by the Book.
30-Ash has mixed its garments
with the wind/ gone to sleep,
its pillow a horizon and a sun.
31-You have resisted . Even the
light has died/ Aren't you a pulse?
In everything there is a dead pulse/ Do you rise? How do I grant my steps
your path ?
How do I begin? And where do I go?
32-
Daylight sat exhausted at my table
and wept / I rejoiced: it was crying with me.
33-The ink of the cave still
prints its axe on the heart of my age . I don't belong to it. I'm its
contrary:
A digger of dreams- clouds which have been promised the lightning.
34-Wherever I go, I find pierced
hearts, and see heads dangling...
35-
The shoulder of daylight is wounded, the night limps/ our square is a grave.
I'll gather a rose and add it to my letters.
Beirut is a fugitive's camel, and death is its howdah /
I saw crimes grazing, saw their lambs,
and saw the dancing of metals.
And I see now: the tents are the tents, the ruins are the ruins;
roads wrapped with the blasts of their flux,
fire understands my language.
36-A monkey is crouching on the
stone of prophecy,
gazing at me as though I were his saint.
Do I say that Ishmael is my fire, Hagar is my abode, and Abraham my garment?
What do I say to him?
Do I claim that I am a god and declare my paradise:
Eve is apples, Adam is lust,
and death is the key of heavens?
Do I say: I have a foot here, and a hand there,
and have horses in the air?
37-
A time which illuminates the image of the new Time
a time- a creative passion, and the grandeur of a feast.
38-The palm trees have bows, but
no arrows.
39-I'll say: Ishmael is a valley
of stones;
will say: Ishmael is clay that has cracked and splintered;
will say: Ishmael is a craftsman's art,
and Hagar has not migrated.
Erasing all wisdom/
This is my fire/
There is no sign left-- my blood is the sign/
This is my beginning /
I entered your pool/
an earth circling round me your limbs a flowing Nile/we floated, we sank/you
intersected in my blood/my waves cut your breasts you were squeezed / Let us
begin: love has forgotten the blade of night/ do I scream that the flood is
coming?/ Let us begin: a cry limps across the city and people are walking
mirrors/ when the salt has gone over we meet are you?/
My love is a wound.
My body a rose on the wound,
which ca not be gathered except as death.
My blood a branch which has surrendered its leaves
and reposed."
Is the rock an answer? Does your death the master the sleeping tempt?
For your breasts I have auras of fondness, for your child face a face that
resembles it...You? I have not found you.
And here is my flame erasing
I entered your pool I have a city beneath my
sorrows I have what renders the green branch a snake and the sun a black lover,
I have.../
Come forward poor of the Earth cover this
age with rags and tears cover it with the body which seeks its warmth...the city
is arches of madness/ the revolution should give birth to its own children I
held . I buried millions of songs and came (are you in my grave?) Give me your
hands to feel follow me . My time has not come yet and the cemetery of the world
has come / For all the sultans I have ashes/ Give me your hands follow me...
ABLE TO CHANGE: THE MINE PLANTED UNDER CIVILIZATION -
THIS IS MY NAME
(A placard)
The footsteps of life halted at the door of
a book that I had erased with my questions: what do I see? I see leaves in
which, it is said, civilizations have rested (do you know a weeping fire?) I see
the hundred as two hundreds the mosque and the church as two executioners and
the Earth as a rose/
An eagle flew in my face / I sanctified the
scent of chaos / may the time of sorrow come / may the people of flame and
rejection rise / my desert is growing / I loved a baffled willow a swaggering
tower an ageing minaret I loved a street on which the Lebanon arranged its
bowels in rows of drawings and mirrors and charms /
I said now I surrender to the abyss of sex
and hand to fire the prelude of the world I said settle down O, Nero, like a
spear in the forehead of creation every home is Rome the imaginary and the real
are Rome and Rome is the city of God and History I said settle like a spear, O.
Nero... /
I ate nothing but sand at eve, my hunger
revolves like the Earth stones palaces temples I spell like bread / in my third
blood I saw the eyes of a wanderer who mixed people
with the waves of his eternal dream
bearing the flame of the distances
in the brain of a prophet and the blood of a savage/
......And they dumped 'Ali down a pit
covered him with straw as the sun was carrying its victims and departing / does
the light know its way in
the land of 'Ali? Will it meet us? We heard the blood, we saw the moaning /
We shall tell the truth: This is a country
which hoisted its thighs
as banners.
We shall tell the truth: This is no country.
It's our lunar stable,
the crutch of Sultans
and the carpet of the prophet.
We shall tell simplicity itself: In the
universe
there is something called presence
and something called absence.
We tell the truth:
We are the absence.
No sky has begotten us, no Earth.
We are froth evaporating
out of the river of words.
We're rust in the sky and its orbits,
and rust in life!
(A clandestine manifesto)
MY HOMELAND IS A REFUGEE IN ME
And may my face be shade!
An age of enamoured stone rambles around me, I, the first lover of fire. The
fire gets pregnant my days are a female fire under her breasts are blood and
clashing the armpits are wells of tears a desultory river the sun sticks to it
like a dress sliding / a wound which it split and caused to sparkle with lust
and spices (is this your foetus?) My sorrows are roses
I entered the school of grass my forehead
cleft and my blood dethroning its reign of power: I wondered what to do? Do I
wrap the city with bread? I splintered in a corridor of fire / we partook of the
blood of kings
and we went hungry
We carry the times,
mixing pebbles with stars
and driving the clouds
like a herd of horses.
ABLE TO CHANGE: THE MINE PLANTED UNDER
CIVILIZATION -
THIS IS MY NAME
The nation has reposed
in the honey of the pulpit and the rebec.
The creator has fortified it like a moat
and sealed it.
Nobody knows where the door is.
Nobody asks where the door is.
(A clandestine manifesto)
.....And they dumped 'Ali down a pit embers
were his garment we blazed we clung to his dismembered body I blazed good
evening, O, Rose of Ashes / 'Ali is a homeland whose name is known to no
language he bleeds negation affirms the grass and water 'Ali is an immigrant /
Where does the lord of sorrow sleep how does
he carry his eyes? My sky is throttled my shoulder wilts and the Earth is a
helmet filled with sand and straw I ran in panic a swallow covered me I rose up
its breasts were flames I rose up opening a window: green fields I the other
conqueror and the Earth is a game a horse entering the clouds /
Enamored trees emerge a bough shakes me
water bursts out and the ancient Time of people is over I commenced my face is
orbits and in the light a revolution lurks a village woke me up in its gusts /
the silence broke embrace me, O, creator of tiredness grant me your swings test
me
I am the rock I am the quest and the question neither a festival nor a hearth I
am the ghost lurking in the crater of the city while people slumber / I entered
the snare of light pure as violence light and shining like the wilderness of
loss my limbs are lightning my limbs are sculpted winds / my bone is not the
taste of thrones or silver I'm not a kingdom my blood is the migration of the
sky and my eyes are birds / it's said your skin is thorns may you die and may my
sky be yellowed by your skin it is said your skin is an age reposing in the
stillness of the dream /
And may the lances of eternal conflict be
born.
Between us stretches a gorge of crumbling,
my voice is the hallucination of an invader
breaking the crutch of songs and uprooting the alphabet /
..... And the women repose in a chamber,
seeking refuge in the inspired Books,
turning the sky
into a guillotine or a toy.
And 'Ali opens his sorrows
to the fools of destitution,
to those who aspired to become eagles
and were broken...
And 'Ali is a magic flame
burning in every water,
sweeping - he left no earth, no books
he swept history, covered daylight with his wings,
delighted to see daylight go mad /
This is the time of death,
but every death in it is an Arab death.
Days drop in its courtyards
like the trunk of an ageing cedar.
It is the last song of a bird
singing in a blazing forest /
My homeland chases me like a river of blood
/ the forehead of civilization is a mouldy pit / I collected a throne was
reincarnated as a lantern/ Damascus became infatuated Baghdad grew tender / the
sword of history is broken in the face of my homeland / who is the fire who is
the flood? /
You were a desert when I arrested the snow
in you I split like you into sand and fog I cried you are a god in order to see
his face to erase
what links me to him I said I fused my body with your body you are the trough
filled with my waves I am the night barefoot when I inserted you into my navel
you procreated as a path in my steps you entered my infant water/ Seek the light
be rooted in my wilderness and wandering
A fruit-bearing numbness creeps round the
head a dream under the pillow my days are a hole in my pocket the world has
decayed / Eve is pregnant in my trousers /
I walk on the ice of my pleasures /
walk between the baffling and the inimitable walk in a rose /
the flowers of despair wither and sadness rusts / an army of crushed faces
crosses history an army like a thread an army that has succumbed and
surrendered, an army like a shadow / I run in the voices of victims alone over
the lip of death like a grave walking in a ball of light
We fused
the blood of the beloved ones protects like eyelashes I heard your pulse in my
skin (are you a forest?) The barrier has collapsed (were you a barrier?) The sea
gull asked a thread in the sea which a captain was spinning the snow of a
traveller sang a sun it couldn't see (are you my sun?) My sun is a feather which
drinks the space / the lost one heard a voice (are you my voice?) / My voice is
my time your voluptuous pulse and your breasts are my blackness and every night
my whiteness
A cloud crept, so I surrendered my face to the flood
and wandered aimlessly in my ruins.../
Thus, I loved a tent
and made the sand in its eyelashes
raining trees, and made the desert
a cloud. I said: This broken pitcher
is a shattered nation, this space
a sore on the eye, these eyes
are holes. I said: madness
is a planet hiding in a tree.
I'll see the face of the crow
in my country's countenance,
and name this book
a shroud, and name
this city carrion
and name the trees of Sham* sorrowful birds,
(perhaps after the naming a flower or a song will be born),
and name the desert a palm tree,
(perhaps the Earth will wake
and return as a child or the dream of a child).
Nothing chants my songs anymore:
"The knights of rejection will come
and the light will come at its appointed time..."
NOTHING REMAINS BUT MADNESS
Does my history have a child in your night
O, ashes of the hearth?
The wrath of revolution is infatuated embers
and a woman's chant:
Does my history have a child in your night?
/
The dust of tradition lodges in the bone /
should I seek refuge? Does dust grant a refuge?
No place and death is in vain... this is dizziness.
He who sees the corpse of the centuries upon his face
and stumbles listless,
feels old age
a nipple for childhood.
ABLE TO CHANGE: THE MINE PLANTED UNDER
CIVILIZATION -
THIS IS MY NAME
Return to your cave histories are swarms of
locusts, here is history living on the lap of a whore ruminating heaving inside
the belly of a she-ass desiring the rottenness of the Earth and walking in a
maggot return to your cave and cast down your eyes /
I glimpse a word /
around which we are all mirage and mud.
'Umru' al-Qays couldn't shake it and al -Ma'arri is its child,
under it al-Junayd caved in as did al-Hallaj and al-Niffari /
Al - Mutanabbi related that it was
the voice and the echo / you are the slave
it is the master /
It is also the angel / the nation is implanted
in it like a seed /
Return to your cave/
What? Have they exiled him or murdered him?/
They have murdered him... no, I'll not recount the death of my friend:
A countryside of yellow flowers rises around me / but I'll write of the last
branch in the cedar tree of the house of a flock of wild doves
dragging the carpet of the night of the dream as high as towers / they've
murdered him... no, I'll not utter the names of witnesses or murderers nor will
I weep / I'll weep over a nation born dumb over the swan embracing the blueness
of the shores weeping why weep over a child over a poet?/ I'll write of the last
shade of the cedar tree of the house of a flock of wild doves dragging the
carpet of the night of the dream as high as mountains /
The Caliph, our lord, decreed a law of water
his people are mud and gravy and melted swords the master wore a crown inlaid
with people's eyes / Is this city a sign are women's garments fashioned out of
the pages of the Qur'an ?/
I inserted the socket of my eye in a gorge dug up by the hours I asked are my
people a river without an estuary?
I sing
the language of blades I scream Time is
punctured its walls have crumbled between my entrails I vomited I no longer have
a history or a present / I am the solar insomnia and the spout the sin and the
action wait for me, O, rider of clouds / my things are seductive and the sun
bludgeons my limbs I am the inhabitant of expanses and psalms I am the bough
seeking refuge: Listen do you hear the wailing in the heart of the world?/ I
listen to death between my wrinkles / we hallucinated / I hallucinated in order
to die well / I culled the breasts among my conventions / is your skin the fall
are your thighs a wound that I filled / the world has healed / are you the
quarry of night in my skin? My ax is sharpened I have become another stream my
bank flows your arms are scooping an arch I carried you my face is bedlam a bird
divided by the voice ask me I reply .../
A book of divination spoke to me its horses
casting a spell on me the whispering has died down (do I, do you, now have
anything to whisper?) / A bridled fire stranded ships a tamed sea / the sea gull
has opened its eyes you close it has forgotten the opening in its ruffled
feathers are water and sparks / had it been had it known thunder had thunder
been in my hands /
Quiet, quiet this is a dome and my dwelling is in the vent of a breast / I go on
digging had I changed had dust changed its virgins had fire been a hamza.*... /
You have dissolved in my being my being has no limits no sword vanish erase I
have vanished one face we are my shirt is not an apple nor are you paradise we
are a field and a harvest and the sun stands guard I have ripened you come from
that green end this is our crop our bodies are a farmer and a harvester / O,
most precious of my limbs come from that end / I've called up my death / and
cascade me we have owned the ember of Time and longing we have owned the
opulence of the universe donning people as its quilt we have found the path.../
I read in yellow leaves that I'd die in
exile I quest for the shimmering light of the deserts my people stray .../
Damascus enters my garments in fear in love it mingles with my entrails
drivelling... /
You have shed your skin leave your lips
dissolve them in my teeth I am night and day I am Time we have dissolved be
rooted in my wanderings and loss... /
Thus I loved a tent,
and made the sand in its eyelashes
raining trees,
and made the desert a cloud.
I saw God as a beggar in the land of 'Ali,
and baked the minaret,
and saw the sea arrive in the fog of the chimney
excited, whispering:
" He who formulated us
laid a foundation that was no more than a garret,
when the tempest struck, it crumbled
becoming wood to be burned in the mansion of a Caliph.
Rarely does the sea speak,
but the sea has now spoken:
' We have withered,
history has withered
because of its repetition in windmills,
the creator has fallen into its coffin...
the created has fallen into its coffin..."
And the women repose in a chamber,
rescuing the night out of its wells,
sewing up the sky,
and singing: ' 'Ali is a magic flame
burning in every water,'
and asking the heavens:
' A star or a mommy, what is this Earth?
Tearing up the heavens,
and patching up the heavens.'
" The impostor has buried a nation in his
eyes.
The impostor has dug a nation out of his eyes,
and we heard him praying over it
and saw him salute it kneeling down,
and we saw
how the nation turned in his palms
into water,
and we saw
how the water became
a windmill ' /
Islands of flames in which Asia ascends
ascends the future /
a sun went out we dreamt of things other than what the night conjured / my
daylight is measurable by flames / I cried for help the voice of peoples is
conquering the universe full of seduction /
NEITHER THE ASH NOR THE WIND AM I
My bed is farther and more salacious/ cages
deserted roads
the horse of the past is ashes and the pigment of God
is a different colour /
NO HAND OVER ME
'Ali is the eternity of fire and childhood /
do you hear the lightning
of the centuries hear the heaving of their footsteps? Is the road a book or a
hand? / The finger of dust is like a dervish singing the dominion of myths / O,
give us a homeland bring near the cities shake the trees of dreams change the
trees of slumber the speech of the heavens to the Earth /
A child wanders aimlessly baffled
under the navel of a black woman searching
a child grows up.
And the Earth has a blind god dying.../
PEACE
to faces ambling in the loneliness of the
desert,
to the East draped in grass and fire peace to the Earth
washed by the sea peace to its passion...
Your thunderbolt of nakedness grants me its
rains thunder grips me in my breast Time has fermented O, advance this is my
blood the glow of the East scoop me and vanish lose me the thunderclap is for
your legs the lightning scoop me take my body as lining for your body / my fire
is the orientation and the planet my wound is guidance I spell.../
I spell a star which I paint,
running away from my homeland in my homeland.
I spell a star which he paints
in the footsteps of his vanquished days.
O, ashes of the Word.
Does my history have a child in your night?
NOTHING REMAINS BUT MADNESS
I glimpse it now on the windows of the
house,
sleepless amongst the sleepless stones,
like a child taught by a witch
that in the sea there is a woman
carrying his history in a ring,
and that she will appear
when the flames in the fireplace subside ... /
...And I saw history in a black banner
marching like a forest /
I wrote no chronicles /
I live in the longing the fire the
revolution,
in the magic of their creative poison.
My homeland is nothing but this spark,
this lightning in the darkness of everlasting Time...
***
THE LITTLE TIME / 2
Where does the distance end? Where does fear
cease to reign?
I summon the void. I empty the full. Even flint is soft, even sand originates in
water.
Why the roads, why the arrival?
Astray, astray, and I'll not return. Falling is my state and condition; paradise
is my contrary.
A wedding I am; and I announce the attractiveness of death. I am the clouds, and
know no dryness; I am aridity and have no clouds.
I hide behind the riddle, hide under the gowns of the seasons
and peep through their holes. I grant my steps their form
and say unto the sea: Follow me.
Trees are leaves in my notebooks; stones are verses like me. I'll abrade the
skin of the horizon, make it bleed and flow. I'll fly between the wound and the
wound.
We divide space between us: Death and I.
We raise the banner of famine: Bread and I.
And tomorrow I'll get entangled in the garments of the legend and climb the wall
of shadows. Then, a procession of psalms of stone will cling to me.
O, Madness, my master, my Christ.
I search for a sun that dwells in the eyes,
for eyes which behold the light - all of the light.
I seek a tree trunk which turns into a body. I seek what gives the word a sex
organ and pierces the sky.
I seek what gives to stone the lips of children, to history a rainbow and to the
songs the larynxes of trees.
I seek what extends the rippling frontiers, the frontiers invisible between the
sea and the rocks, the clouds and the sands, daylight and night.
I seek what unifies our accents: God and I, Satan and I, the world and I; and
what sows between us the seeds of conflict.
O, Spirit of quest, O, my vessel.
A SONG TO HE
I have not said, O, brother, You are dead.
I have said: You will go, and you know what is coming.
Your steps have halted, but your shadow
still extends with a child's hands.
I wonder:
Are you still alive?
Are my eyes your eyes?
Is death mirrors between us?
I see what you have seen,
translate myself to myself.
Are we, I wonder, a single body
sharing the bread of tragedy,
the bread of love and life?
Two strangers, two gaunt, down-trodden figures.?
I cry: I am the Karbula'* of yearning.
And you shout: O, my master, al-Husain.
A SONG TO THE SECRET
Leave him to his secrets.
He seats the sea at times on his lap,
and at times below his window.
Leave him to his secrets.
He masquerades with grass,
or wears the face of stone.
Leave him to his secrets.
He is a field of love
which changes with every season,
turning over the trees in his palms.
A SONG TO LANGUAGES
All these languages, these fragments,
are leaven
for the cities to come.
Change the structure of the noun, the verb, the letter;
say:
No veils remain between us,
no dams.
And delight your hearts with the fatihas*
of the Suras* of desire
and the ecstasies of their sealed heavens.
UNBOUNDED FLIGHTS
For angels forged of silver and lead,
for sands trailing their golden cloaks,
collapsing and sobbing in the cage of the alphabet,
his land is the lung bleeding,
as a river loses its course,
and lightning its flashing flame;
and I see it slumbering.
Yet, I confront these deserts,
as though I were the dawn of speech.
I say without surprise:
A time of desire and widows of metal
and the place is splitting apart.
-This place has always been splitting apaart;
has been maps of mustiness and dust.
Always has this place been
splintering in two fists
of siege and devouring.
Yet, I confront this labyrinth,
as though I were the dawn of speech.
And I say without surprise:
A star appeared and was devoured by ants,
and I repeat that smoke
is the nuptial of the winds.
O, winds,
accept what remains of my body :
two roses, my anxiety and my yearning,
weave out of them your invisible shawls,
and let them be our greeting
to wandering and its Arabian ruins.
And I say without surprise:
This homeland is no more than a conjecture,
and it is now....
- Don't utter a word.
Have you gone mad, or have the visions led you astray?
And it is now a cemetery: a metallic policeman, burial of the living,
and where are you from?
Had you crossed the borders here and there,
and seen the ones who yearn for light
folded as clothing
and dumped into bottomless pits of darkness,
you would have wished that all speech became
destruction and raging fires,
would have torn these maps, these banners,
and would have, like me, blasphemed.
This homeland is no more than a bit of a conjecture.
And I say without surprise:
The millions are green ; from them arise the voice and the echo,
and I am the wolf of this space,
the only one who suffers the agonies of death,
and stumbles astray,
no star, no guidance,
lost between one field and another,
groping for the veins of grass,
and asking each flower
about its sister.
And I say without surprise:
Console me, O, time of weariness.
I have come to like crouching by the rock of the impossible,
like a child who loves travelling
in space,
mounting the back of a reed.
- Do not say: Despair and escapism.
The wind escapes in order to embrace the Earth,
and despair opens its regal doors
to the explosions of the orbits.
Say: A bearer of ill tidings.
And listen to the witness hiding
behind the trunks of palm trees,
and read the witness inscribed with dates and ginger
in leaves of silk...
And I say without surprise to the dew:
Have you seen the place, experienced the fields?
Are those covering them people or plants?
Thus I dare to adore the dew
and sing for it,
flowing as though early dawn were its banks,
opening its bags like letters between the branches of trees.
What do your hands carry?
For whom does the horizon write its secrets?
Is the road stretching along your banks another blood,
an adventurous gleam,
or a gasping poet?
And I say without surprise:
My amazement is that I have not yet aged,
that this wreckage
has only bestowed greater splendour
upon me.
- Here is a rose lusting
to be a woman in his arms.
- Here are his extinguished fires
beginning to glow.
And now I am a child,
as though the moon were bells
in my footsteps .
I say without surprise:
I have my passion,
my everlasting intoxication .
The letters are women who whisper to me whatever they desire,
and to them I grant my unbounded flights.
And, free of all illusions, I declare:
This is my life-
Sparks and horses of light,
bolting out of the chariots of images.
ANOTHER SONG TO HE
They girdle him with their eyelashes
and cast their shade over his body.
Amongst them, he is like a soul
fluttering;
love is a throne,
and the sun in his hands
is an incense burner.
And around him,
their myths grow taller.
How, when and whence do I enter into this throng ?
And I am only the story - teller, only the narrator.
I am nothing but the echo
watchful at his prophetic door-
the echo,
and the throes of death of words.
THE BEGINNING OF SWEEPING
Don't say:" You have gone mad."
My madness is your dreams/ we've come
and painted the fields
a body in bloom.
We used to say:
"If only we would come and rape the universe."
And we have come.
He who sees you sees me- I, the primordial
rose.
In the ashes of evening I broke,
with dawn I perfumed my roots- my downy leaves
gathered as a ladder /
Is that the voice of someone approaching?
Or footsteps fading away?
He who sees you sees me- I, who reveals
the secret thoughts
and offers himself to thunder:
this is a shaft of light.
Change the image of nature,
mix rock with wings, ecstasy with tragedy.
Everything on Earth is new /
My face an open space,
and the distance the beginning of eyes.
He who sees you sees me /
We screamed:
"There is no path but the path of fire." We 've come.
No coming unless it strikes as lightning;
and we've come.
Prisons are still growing ;
exiles flutter with eyelashes;
fear is raging, and those possessed by fear
are leaves.
Prisons are growing /
And they fall upon poetry in cloaks, in corners,
invoking their canonical rules,
and walking in a space of beads.
And I am the one who shatters all rules,
I, the primordial womb.
And they say: "This is obscurity."
And they say: "This is a world of absence."
O, regal lust,
take my words into your world of absence.
Take my steps into your world of absence.
And bolt and take me,
O, regal lust.
If you see at the university gate
a star, take her by the hand.
If you see at the university gate
a planet, embrace him...
We wrote on the university gate:
Histories are crumbling.
The fires are ravaging .
Our steps
are flames penetrating the corpse of the Earth.
We uproot the family
to establish friendship/ Sing.
Sing for the fractures which cover this time with wounds,
for this is the time of crumbling /
Sing.
Sing for the devouring tragedy.
Make room for the chained body
to give a feast for nature,
make room for its songs.
Sauntering you have come, submerged
in the ocean of Arab blood.
More luscious you have come
than a thunderbolt.
Don't say:" You've gone mad."
My madness is your dreams/ we've come,
descended into the darkness, broken its lanterns, and come
like a land yearning for rain/ we've come
like thunder draped in clouds/ A promise:
You will be dawn,
and Time will be balconies for our dreams...
Everything is new on Earth; the alphabet is
flames,
and madness a voyage between it and me,
a horizon
spelling the invisible frontiers.
And our name is one-
I ' ve rooted myself in trees that never
die.
I ' ve seen the steps, and seen the houses
crumbling, crumbling /
These are my sparks.
The distance is pregnant.
Our name is one- and we are sweeping.
This is our space:
to shatter the orbits, to be nothing
but this madness
madness
madness.
THE BEGINNING OF SPEECH
That child I had been
came once to me
a strange face.
He said nothing . We walked,
each glancing at the other in silence; our steps
a river flowing estranged.
In the name of the leaves strewn in the
wind,
the origins brought us together.
Then we departed,
a forest inscribed by the Earth,
and narrated by the seasons.
O, child that I once was, come near.
What is there now to draw us together?
And what is there to say?
THE BUNDLE OF REEDS
(Faces and masks. A hall with many
entrances of a bygone style).
- I -
FACE 1:
I hear that people are angry,
that in their hearts
prayer entwines with fire...
MASK 2:
Angry?
They'll soon be calm and contented.
The sword and gold
will extinguish their fire...
FACE 1:
It will blaze again.
MASK 2 (fervently):
So will blaze again,
tying them up like a bundle of reeds,
the sword and gold
and the flames of murder.
(He falls silent; then, as if dreaming)
Then the hearts will falter
and the knees will totter,
and the rebels will be cooked
like chicken for a feast...
(He laughs)
FACE 1:
You scorn people, lock them up like cattle
waiting for slaughter;
you devour them...
MASK 2 (astonished):
A new larynx
sharpened on the blade of the rebels?
(in a tone of advice)
Leave the people alone, my friend.
They are, as I have discovered, a monster
always hungry
unless you feed it to the sword,
or stuff its mouth with gold.
(Exits).
(Masks bowing down to the ground; in one
corner a woman, erect like a statue, embracing a skull).
MASK 1 ( resembling a barrel; headless,
addressing FACE 1, and gesturing towards the bowing masks):
The people, your eternal amulet.
You see?
(Pointing scornfully to the bowing masks).
FACE 1:
No. It's your tyrannical image
that you have displayed.
The people are neither straws
for you to break, nor a mask...
MASK 1 (furiously):
Take him;
make his head a gift,
a human goblet of bones .
(Exit some masks, dragging FACE 1; other masks enter).
- II -
MASK 2 (addressing MASK 1, while presenting him with a goblet - shaped
skull):
The first of my gifts to my lord
as people witness .
(pointing to the masks)
Tell him; come forth...
MASK 3
(taking a skull, goes forward; stands in military fashion in front of MASK 1):
Their voices stretch under our steps
like a staircase.
(steps aside)
MASK 4
(carrying an arm, moves forward in military fashion stopping parallel to MASK
3):
Their shoulders are lean
and carmine-like pillows.
MASK 5
(carrying a leg and an arm; same movements):
Their bodies are blown like the corpse of
the desert,
and the desert is like a table laid for a feast.
MASK 1
(in a husky, crazed voice ):
The spear. Here...
in the heart and consciousness,
in the navel of the pregnant woman,
in the eye of the child,
in the inhaling and exhaling,
in the nearby trees and the distant stars.
Murder, here... My only seeds.
Here, here....
My only land.
(Everybody bursts into crazy laughter)
FOUR SONGS FOR THE BUNDLE OF REEDS
1- The Hungry Man
(A Dream )
Hunger paints on his notebook
stars or roads,
and covers the leaves
with veils of dreams.
We glimpsed
a sun of love fluttering its eyelashes,
and glimpsed
a rising dawn.
2 - Sleep and Rising from Sleep
In his sleep, he fashions a model
for a rampant revolution
which embraces the rising future.
Then he awakens;
his days become
a parrot
lamenting the passing night
and his vanished dreams.
3- The People
(A Dream)
The trees gathered
laden, like fruits, with screams and yearning,
and marched
along the riverbanks.
Thunder rattled them
as though it were sparks.
The trees were struck dumbfounded
in sorrow over their captive birds
on the other side of the river's flank.
4- Wrath
( A Dream )
The Euphrates is enraged.
Its banks are filled with larynxes,
towers of shocks and thunder;
and the waves are horses.
I saw dawn with its tresses cut,
I saw the water, its roaring sharpened,
flowing, embracing its spears.
The Euphrates is enraged.
Neither the fire, nor the prayers
will extinguish that wounded wrath.
CHARMS FOR THE CITIES OF AL- GHAZALI
1 - The Body of A Pebble
That which I have called the history and the
beginning
is smooth, closed, and lifeless
like the body of a pebble.
That which grants us its providence
is a spider's bed.
The waters in the Orantes and Euphrates
are ink.
The desert of footsteps is words
or papers, no difference.
And the citadels, bundled up, are running .
A bare night. No dreams, no rays.
No ; you are not a water lily,
nor a bunch of the roses of brotherhood.
Neither inspiration nor prophecy,
nor a wakeful star by the bridge
reading the waters of the river.
No body in you reads,
no body asks questions .
You are a tyrant
who bakes bread
out of the victims' bodies.
Nor are you
the breasts of a virgin
in a festival for love.
....A skin you are;
no more than a goat's skin,
even if you procreate, hire a husband
and come to people in a silken dress
and with a human countenance.
And I am Fate, I am the way.
I shake the sea.
My death is a ship,
and my remains
an alphabet
or an imminent explosion.
2 - Had You Dwelled
Had you dwelled, as I said, in my voice,
you would have found the right path
and its orbit of ascendance ;
you would have draped yourself
in the garments of the travellers,
who drink the suns and their dimensions
in their enthralling trance.
And would have quenched your thirst.
Had you dwelled, as I said, in my voice,
you would have become the word of divination
and its rainbow-like lighthouses
between our paper-like days
and the snows of the distance.
And would have found the right path.
3 - The Foundation
- In order for it to stand erect,
in order for it to be,
grip its hand this way
and hold its face.
Invent a spark;
devour its belt and motionless shoulder,
and pull to the left
its stubborn axis;
and move the crouching corner.
Then,
alter the base and stones
and change the foundation...
***
ADONIS
SELECTED AND TRANSLATED
by
KAMAL ABU-DEEB
THE TIME
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
What blood is this that flows across the sand,
what eclipse is this?
Tell us, O, flame of the present,
what shall we say?
The tatters of history fill my larynx
and on my countenance the signs
of the victim.
How bitter language has now become,
and how narrow the door of the alphabet.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
..../ A friend turned executioner? A neighbour said:
How slow is Hulago? Who is knocking ?
A ransom collector?
Give him the dues..
Shapes of women and men...walking images/
We gestured
and exchanged whispers,
our footsteps a string of murder/
Does your murder beget your God
or your God beget your murder?
- The riddle has confused him,
so he bent,
an arch of terror over his drooping days.
- I have lost a brother, my father has gone
insane,
and my children have died.
Whose help do I invoke? Do I hug the door?
Complain to a carpet?
- He is dazed ; bring the urn and grant hhim recovery
with the snuff of the Ayatullahs.
Corpses which the murderer reads as
anecdotes,
heaps of bones.
Is this mass a child's head, or a piece of charcoal?
Is what I see a body or a skeleton of clay?
I bow down, patch up two eyes, and stitch up a flank.
Guessing may assist me
and the light of memory may guide me.
But in vain I read the tenuous thread,
in vain I assemble a head, two legs, two arms,
to discover the identity of the victim.
-To whom does the ant offer its lesson?
and why the amazement?
Poetry
is the fusion of this tragic spark with the eye;
and a trance it is
to see your house raised to God in fragments.
The owl of a clairvoyant shrieks on top of a minaret,
weaving its voice as a rainbow,
and crying, throttled, to the point of joy.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire.
..../ The fool reveals his secrets:
This rebellious time is a jeweller's shop,
and a mire of prophets.
The fool reveals his secrets:
The truth will be death;
death the bread of poets
and that which is called, or has become, the homeland
is nothing but a time floating on the surface of Time.
The fool reveals his secrets:
Where is your key, O, splendour of the flood?
Please submerge me,
and take the last of my shores, take me.
I'm enthralled by fathomless seas ablaze,
enthralled by a burning straw,
by roads which startle all roads.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire.
My soul has forgotten the things of its passion,
forgotten its legacy, preserved in the house of images.
It no longer remembers what the rain pronounces,
what the ink of trees inscribes;
no longer paints anything
but a sea gull flung by the waves onto the ropes of a ship;
it no longer hears anything
but iron screaming: Here is the city's breast,
a moon is ruptured, tied to the umbilical cord
of a ghoul of sparks;
it no longer knows that God and the poet
are two children
slumbering on the cheek of a stone.
My soul has forgotten the things of its passion.
Therefore, the shadow -the looming tomorrow- terrorizes me;
therefore doubts encompass me,
and the dream resists me.
Chained, I run from one fire to another.
I have plunged under the sweat flowing out of my body,
shared with the walls
the night insomnia/(the steps of night are beasts...)
And many a time I have said to poetry,
lying heavy at the bottom of my memory:
What is the saw that presses on my neck,
dictating the Verse of silence ?
To whom do I narrate my ashes
when I don't know how to tear the pulse and flick it over a table,
when I refuse to make my sorrow a drum for the sky.
Then, let me confess:
My life has been no more
than a mill of the wind and a house of phantoms.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of flames:
The trees of love in Qassabin have brothered
the trees of death in Beirut.
And here is the forest of basil consoling
the forest of exile .
As Qassabin enters the map of grass,
and distils the entrails of the plains,
Beirut enters the map of death/
graves like orchards - the dismembered limbs
are fields.
What is it that spills Qassabin in Saida or in Sur,
when it is Beirut that is spilling?
What is it that in its distance draws so close?
What is it that mixes in my map
all these bloods?
....Summer has withered; autumn has not
arrived;
spring is blackened in the memory of the earth/
winter is as death paints it: bleeding or in the throes of death .
A time emerges out of the flask of predestination
and the palm of fate;
a time of wandering which improvises Time
and ruminates the air.
How, and from where do you hope to know
this faceless murderer /who wears all faces...
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
Exhausted, I turn now and gaze into the distance-
What are these rags?
Histories? Countries? Banners on the cliff of dusk?
Here, in the instant I read whole
generations,
and in the corpse I read a thousand corpses.
Here, the fathomless waves of absurdity submerge me,
my body breaks loose out of my control,
my face is no longer in its mirrors
and my blood shies away from its arteries...
Is it because I don't see the light which transports my dreams to it?
Is it because I am a distant extreme
of the universe
which all others bless while against it I blaspheme ?
What is it that uproots my depths and proceeds
through jungles of desire, countries- oceans of tears
and dynasties of symbols,
through races and nations- centuries and peoples?
What is it that separates my self from my self?
What is it that destroys me, negates me?
Am I a crossroad?
Is my path no longer my path
at the moment of revelation?
Am I more than one person, my history my cliff of falling,
and my rendezvous my fire?
What is it that rises in the cackle
rising out of my suffocating limbs?
Am I more than one person, each asking the other:
Who are you? And from where ?
Are my limbs jungles of conflicts
.....in a blood which is a wind and a body which is a leaf?
Is it madness? Who am I in this darkness?
Teach me and guide me, O, madness.
Who am I, my friends, the clairvoyant and oppressed?
I wish I could break out of my skin.
not knowing who I was or who I will be.
I am searching for a name and something to name,
while nothing can be named.
A blind time, and a blinded history.
A time of mud, and a history of wreckage.
And the one who owns is owned /
So, bless you, bless you,
O, darkness.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
My Semitic grandfather is gripped by what blind fate begets.
A parrot, or a prophet poured into a mummy?
O, grandfather, whose path I now desert,
alright; you are the one who dwells in the water germ
and the folds of the heavens;
and it is wise of you to walk, as you do, proudly backwards;
you are the secret and the kingdom stuffed
with prophecies-
and I am the one incapable of comprehending you.
I am the one who strayed, and you are the miracle.
O, grandfather, whom I now reject,
and in whose creative name I had loved Creation,
as of now, you will not recognize me;
nothing will relate me to you
except those ruins sedimenting in the depth of my soul
lamenting me, and making me lament you.
Hugging the ear of corn
of Time,
my head a tower of fire:
The end of the age that rained sijjil**
now meets the beginning
of the age that rains oil.
And the god of palms grovels
at the feet of a metallic god .
And between the two gods I am
the spilt blood and retreating caravan,
groping for my dying fire
and trying to cope with my death,
which rages rampantly across its desert.
And I say:
The universe is nothing but what my dreams weave.
.../The threads dissolve,
and I see myself in the void of an abyss,
plummeting into the night of descent.
I see things as wheels of smoke
and see the world as a hunter's game:
The table has been laid, bodies are vegetables, the bowls are heads;
God sits at the table of the hunt:
a deer
which had been a baker,
a lizard
which had been a soldier/
Is it a god devouring the hunt,
or is the hunt devouring the god?
Roads that lie, shores that betray;
how can madness but strike you now?
Thus I desert the eater and the eaten
and seek repose in every space of wandering.
My consolation is that I delve deep into my dream,-
straying afar, and rippling,
singing the lust of rejection,
hallucinating:
" The orbit of Venus is an anklet for my days,
and Capricorn a bracelet."
And I say: "Flowers in their crowns
are balconies..."
My consolation is that I rebel beyond all bounds,
and alert the verbs of rebellion.
Saddle these rampant winds.
History is slain, and slaughtering is only the prelude.
Leave the slaughterer, the slaughtering and the slaughtered
as witnesses,
and cover me with the remains of history, engrave me
as a ruin amongst the ruins.
Thus, I distil wisdom from its purest
source,
shouting, welcome to my ruins, welcome to this eclipse.
Tomorrow death will extinguish me,
but extinguished I will not be.
Tomorrow I 'll exit from one light to another .
It is true that I am more frail than a thread,
but I am more sublime than a god.
Thus I begin,
hugging my land and the secrets of her passions.
Her lover is the body of the sea,
whose arms are the sun .
A body - storehouse of thunder
and anchor of tenderness.
A body - a promise, and I am the one absent in it.
I am the one rising out of this wager.
A body /
Cover the face of the lilies with the light of infatuated rain.
And let it be...
I hug the age to come and walk,
swaggering, as a ship's captain walks,
designing my homeland.
Go
climb its highest peaks,
descend its lowest gorges,
you will find no fear or shackles.
As though the birds were boughs,
the Earth a child, myths were women.
A dream?
I grant to those who come after me
the bliss of inaugurating this space.
My skin isn't a hut of thoughts,
nor is my passion a woodcutter of memories.
My ancestry is that of rejection,
my weddings are the impregnation
between two poles.
And this age is my age:
The dead god, the blind machine.
And my age
is that I inhabit the pool of desires,
that my dismembered limbs are my flowers,
that I am
the alif of water and the ya of fire,*
and that I am
the madman of life.
Revealing to Time the secrets of his
passions,
thus he confesses:
He is the one who goes astray,
he is the one who leads astray,
he is the dissenting, the outsider and the differing.
Wrapped in my blood I come,
led by raging fires, guided by ruins.
Crowds of people ripple as torrents of tongues:
Each phrase is a king, each mouth is a tribe.
....And I am the one disowned by every tribe.
1
I exited, embraced by wounds
and embracing the murdered Earth,
building my tents in my blood
and telling my name to gather my notebooks
from the house of Ishmael
2
(Ishmael floats,
a desert
3 of dying books; above
him
a moon donning its sabre
and dragging along its camels...)
I search for the guiding sparks / 'The Daughters of the Coffin'*
slumbering in the down of darkness / in their light
I see my face a ladybird, see my death
a bird perching on the shoulder of the dark,
and see the sand improvising speech.
On the east side of the Euphrates the storks
carry the keys of migration,
having destroyed their nests.
And on the West Side a temple rises /
two breasts swelling with chaff.
/...And I am the one disowned by every
tribe.
Here I am, ravished by my own hands /
my blood at war with my blood;
a body is torn inside a body,
and love is no body; my death is no body.
5
Who are you ?
6 My wreckage yells at me
and my words are on the verge of denying me.
A fire comes to him from a land which floats
and slumbers under his pillow.
-----------------------------
A fire comes to him from a land which floats on heads
stuffed with tongues - creatures created by a god who dictates
blood as books, affirms what he wills
for them, and abolishes what he wills .
A fire comes to him from a land which floats,
sparks come close to gripping him.
How can he exit - how can he break the siege?
7
-----------------------------
I said farewell;
I recall a figure crouching in the house of Ishmael
8
stringing a rock to a cloud,
gashing the stars with stones,
living amongst tortoises
which drifted into dreams and went to sleep.
I said farewell/ I recall a howdah
hallucinating
9 with my lady,
and I recall a nation
hallucinating with the last remains:
A headless beast, crowning itself a god
throwing its shadow
a homeland like a jester's hat.
(Its shadow
10 is a land which
spreads its fields
as beds, and is guided.....)
I said farewell.
Eclipse engraved itself upon my forehead.
I granted my accent to fragmented time
and granted its accent my certainty.
/ ......And the Earth
11 enters into metallic
coughing /
streets paved with children - offerings,
12
a nation vaunting its throne of bones .
13
-----------------------------
Go, roam around;
thoughts like rotten fishes, a city of tongues
chopped up and trampled over.
Go, roam around,
and ask the roots
how the body of the place draped itself in its beasts;
or ask the crow of the alphabet- Ishmael's body,
(Ishmael is the map of the ages).
Go, roam around/
open a head here, open a thought there.
-----------------------------
You will see an image of your face,
unknown.
You will see your garments on the body of another.
Perhaps you will get ensnared by teeth
which speak the language of angels,
or have the shape of the heavens.
Go, roam around/
You will see pigs transformed by The Book into gazelles.
-----------------------------
...../ And we are afraid to feel the loaf.
And what to say to a murderer
who weaves
blood into pillows ?
14
Who are you, Ishmael ?
15 Your footsteps bleed
books which snake-charmers collect.
In each letter is a pit,
in each comma a mirage .
Nonsense and the divination of a fable.
You've left me no place near you,
a place where my ink can weave its garments,
that the liberating flames may brother what I feel and say/
You've split me in two,
created a schism between my blood and me -
Who are you, Ishmael?
And how do I see you the moment I don't see you ?
-----------------------------
But Ishmael is a wound,
and I am the comrade of his suffering.
My visions nurture him tenderly,
and I am a letter written to him-
a letter from an insider - an outsider.
-----------------------------
/.... And the Earth enters into metallic coughing/
Its prophet is Hayy ben Bayy
16 .
The nation has shrivelled and dissolved
in a stream of mud which flows and dissolves
in Hayy ben Bayy.
O, Sun, O, foot of daylight,
you have deserted your night with us,
and forgotten it...
- Who are you?
- A man from Tamim.
" And if a flea on the back of a flea
attacks Tamim,
their crowds will flee."
17
-No, I am not from Tamim.
- Who are you? A Taghlibite?
- No, I'm not a Taghlibite.
18
.../ And the Earth enters into metallic coughing/
Its prophet is Hayy ben Bayy
19 .
Who are you, Ishmael? Our stage
20 continues its show.
-" Exalting your glory on high."t;
The neck of the shell is a priest
who strings Time to his threads,
and tailors a pair of trousers for each moment.
-"Exalting your glory on high"..
Who are you, Ishmael?
(It's said that the sun
for you is but a pitcher,
and the Earth is but a plate...)
Are you a magician's fortress,
or a ghoul's head?
-" Exalting your glory on high "t;.
21
The lung of the ages is ruptured
and the Earth is a weaver's rag.
Wrapped in my blood I walk,
led by raging flames, guided by wreckage.
A festival with which annihilation favours its offsprings,
a festival for Ishmael putting an end to Time.
(Would he, I wonder, inaugurate Time?)
A festival too grand for the place to accommodate .
It is said Ishmael has come, and it is said he has disappeared,
his guests have packed the place:
sects and deities which feast together, eat one another,
- and the words get jumbled.
-----------------------------
- One crowd distributes roses,
celebrating the erection of guillotines .
-The Arab atlas is the skin of an ostrichh which defeated another ostrich.
- No victor but He / The saddle of His hoorse is gold,
and a cloud is His forehead.
-----------------------------
A festival for Ishmael (Ishmael came and, it is said, he disappeared),
his guests are sects and deities which feast together
and eat one another- divinity mingles with bullets.
Is this the salvation ?
24
I call you, Ishmael; the wine of our
covenant has been served
and the feast of dusk
is in all its glory -
You and I are the servers of wine, and around us
the insects of weapons besieging us
and hatching their eggs...
I call you, Ishmael; I inaugurate the end: I am not your offspring.
25
Before you, I gave my Paradise its Eve,
and before you, I beheld the face of God .
I call you, Ishmael ; I end what you began-
I give my feast in the hall of the ages.
I uproot myself from you. (The last sea gull to read the shores
is sitting by my side,
and the first sea gull to write the shores
is sitting by my side) .
I inaugurate the beginning,
creating playfulness like the face of God,
swimming in the waters of the alphabet:
in everything His secret flows;
it's not for the like of Him to be enchanted by His roots,
or to be delimited by an identity .
26
I learn the words anew, I master their secrets
and say:
My roots are play,
and the boastful swagger of ecstasy-
A revelation which inaugurates every light in fondness,
and makes the earth its bed, as does a stream .
27
And I say: My ancestry is a passion
which was enamoured with space,
and forged its sails out of the body of the air .
Dawn attires me in its bountiful joys,
and each cloud
is a homeland for my love .
28
I also say:
My love learns the words anew,
masters their magic,
and shares with noble grapes
their cunning .
29
The days of my love are trees impregnated by
the seasons-
its hands are dawn -
not the dawn of Ishmael,
but this blood poured out in the cup of words;
not yesterday,
but this wreckage:
corpses, a brother and a brother,
gardens of friends and lovers ;
corpses- promises, the yearning of the absent,
the longing of those living in waiting,
and the passion of a dreamer;
corpses- feasts, their wine is the sky, their savouries are books;
corpses- impossible to tell the butchering sword,
from the butchered neck, from...
corpses-
out of the vapor of their flux rise Suras* which proclaim:
Murder is the beginning ; the murderer is jumbled with his victim;
a house screams: I am a grave;
a poet yells:
My people are a space of blood;
and space confuses space.
Wrapped in my blood, he walks
led by raging fires, guided by ruins:
I walk ahead of words towards their bed
in order to see the lake of their death.
Dusk has said:
I have erected the neck of ash
30
as a bridge to every prophecy .
Dusk has said:
Barren is the body of the city;
I have impregnated it, revealed its sex
to the liberating sap.
Dusk has said:
Had I had a home, I would have invited you
and said to you: 'Here you can believe and disbelieve,
blaspheme or mock or dream.'
and would have had a wider space for your madness,
would have been the most faithful friend.
Dusk has said.
That I may have the bliss of hearing the
voice
whispered by the larynx of dusk,
I've granted my poppies to friendly fields,
and my inkpots to the leaves of the seasons.
I have granted my memory to each wrinkle
in that body which I have called a 'homeland',
and which lives without a homeland.
I've given the tiles of snow my verses
in order to grant them warmth.
I've given the sheikh of the wind a crutch
which my father inherited from his grandfather.
I've given the eyelashes of the winds my windows.
I have given every lover my passion and fire.
I have given Hagar everything a son can give.
I have given Ishmael the prettiest things my childhood knew,
that I may have the bliss of hearing the voice
which the larynx of dusk has whispered.
Dusk;
and Ishmael is entering dusk,
the dictation of a desert,
and your rolling head
is its rhythm.
33
Dusk, and nature rejoices in dusk.
My blood is an ode to dusk.
A willow spreads its tresses
in order to cuddle dusk.
Water deserts its course
in order to witness dusk.
In everything there is a rose leaning
tenderly on the shoulder of dusk.
34
