Our cigarette packs
close to hand (that secret fuel) . . .
The babble of immigrants
slapping dominoes on marbletops:
a noise familiar once,
out of which
a word may flare up amid the smoke –
born there, refusing
to die here.
If we don’t say it, who will?
And who are we
if we don’t?
الأرشيف الخاص في 'Poems in English' لهذا القسم
On the highest deck –
in the lowest dump as well –
there’s always a storyteller.
The story will be told.
Whose story: mine or yours?
Perhaps . . . his? No matter from whose
point of view, it will
be told: you, making up a story
full of gaps about me.
Are you already tired?
Our quest has barely begun.
Forget the sea.
Stop dreaming of ships and trade
I’m the last voyage you will
ever make, and likewise
was the first.
Every way
you came by,
every road you took,
I paved with my own hands
for your sake.
The century is almost over;
How did it start, when will it end,
against whom is this battle being waged?
Since it began: From the first chapter. Before speech.
Those who stayed behind,
read the writing on the wall.
He who migrated, never found the promised land.
Speak, what will you say?
Or don’t speak, and just listen.
The air is suddenly
incensed, night shivers
inside the tree,
as we listen to a storm
of fluttering wings
that rise by their thousands
You said
that you write while the bombs
rain down, erase the history of the roofs,
eradicate the faces of the houses.
You said:
I write to you while God
allows them to write my destiny;
this is what makes me doubt He is God.
Where the sun used to dance
on window panes in some village,
on water flowing through the orchards,
there is nothing but a river of sand now,
gluttonous with the force of oblivion,
on whose banks nothing grows but time,
here, on the other side of the border.
I woke up in this house
kept by a woman who disappears
for weeks at a time, to wander along the river.
When she comes back, she moors
her light skiff to my thigh
while I sleep, and drags her bruised body
in heavy silence to my bed.
A man dreamt
that he left
his city, one day, in a storm
that was bending the fields;
columns of dust rose at its approach
on the outskirts of a hamlet
that rode the wind, and wove
around his feet.
I play alone.
An hour.
Or two.
I spread the cards on the table.
When will you show up?
Player, all this luck is for you.
Appear. I will stay up until dawn
waiting for your sight.
To whom will I show my cards?
Without you, what meaning to my game?
I will play. But first,
what are the rules: if I’m […]