You watch silver gleam on the scales of fish.
You watch something that breaks under the sun.
You watch as I dive into the sound,
and then you reach out
Hibal sutek il-shamsy fanalaha-il-raneen:
Ropes of your sun-filled sound are reined by the resonance.
The letters spread in the water like this:
Hub il-sut kal-shamsi yafna lahu il-raneen:
Love of the sound is like the sun
for which the resonance will perish.
The Artist Child
—I want to draw the sky.
—Draw it, my darling.
—I have.
—And why do you spread
the colors this way?
—Because the sky
has no edges.
…
—I want to draw the earth.
—Draw it, my darling.
—I have.
—And who is this?
—She is my friend.
—And where is the earth?
—In her handbag.
…
—I want to draw the moon.
—Draw it, my darling.
—I can’t.
—Why?
—The waves shatter it
continuously.
…
—I want to draw paradise.
—Draw it, my darling.
—I have.
—But I don’t see any colors.
—It is colorless.
…
—I want to draw the war.
—Draw it, my darling.
—I have.
—And what is this circle?
—Guess.
—A drop of blood?
—No.
—A bullet?
—No.
—Then, what?
—The button
that turns off the lights.
The Departure of Friends
The country left my jar.
My friends left the country.
Everything perished, except the country’s dust.
I took a handful,
and formed a statue from the darkness.
I held up a candelabra to the statue.
Whose tear is this?
What is this that melts?
Why do things return to dust?
I took a handful,
and formed another jar.
I urged the jar to leave the country.
Why is the jar empty inside?
Whose absence drops
and makes the rain fall like the gods?
I want something new under the sun.
I beat the rain with my stick.
Dust from a broken jar
flows into my hand.
A Tombstone
Blessed is the fruit of my heart (my loss),
curved with tenderness
like an inverted hollow.
Here I am
coldly counting all the flowers
thrown on my corpse.
They are busy pounding in the nails
while, by mistake, my dreams still leap
inside the coffin,
confused by the excess
of sparrows in my slumber
(without wings they plunged into my sleep).
—Who dreams, in my place?—
You who fill my skull with ashes, please
destroy my memories completely
(the bells ring endlessly).
The gravedigger is preoccupied…
And I, without concern, wipe away
the dust from my immortality
and gaze toward:
Here in the hope of resurrection lies
a suitable citizen for oblivion.
The Theory of Absence
The hypothesis: I am tense and so are you.
We neither meet nor separate.
The desired result: We meet in the absence.
We neither meet nor separate (the hypothesis)
so we must be parallel.
If two parallel lines are bisected by a third line
(in this case, the line of tension)
their corresponding angles must be equal (a geometrical theorem).
So we are congruent (because shapes are congruent
when their angles are equal)
and we form a circle (since the sum
of two congruent arcs
is a circle).
Therefore, we meet in the absence
(since the circumference of a circle
is the sum of contiguous points
which can each be considered
a point of contact).
Nothing Here is Enough
I need a parrot,
identical days,
a quantity of needles,
and artificial ink
to make history.
I need veiled eyelids,
black lines,
and ruined puppets
to make geography.
I need a sky wider than longing,
and water that is not H2O
to make wings.
The days are no longer enough
to distinguish the missing.
I no longer see you
because I no longer dream.
I offer a tear to the rain
as if scattering you
in the Dead Sea,
and in order to sing you,
I need glass to muffle the sound.
What’s New?
I saw a ghost pass in the mirror.
Someone whispered something in my ear.
I said a word, and left.
Graves were scattered with mandrake seeds.
A bleating sound entered the assembly.
Gardens remained hanging.
Straw was scattered with the words.
No fruit is left.
Someone climbed on the shoulders of another.
Someone descended into the netherworld.
Other things are happening
in secret.
I don’t know what they are—
this is everything.
The Pomegranate Seeds
A long time has passed since we were first imprisoned
in the pomegranate.
In vain we rush and strike the interior surface with our heads,
hoping that a hole might open for us,
so that we could meet the air just once…
Our losses increase each day.
Some of the seeds sacrificed their juice for freedom
as they ripped their way through the trenches.
I told my sisters, the pomegranate seeds:
The dents which begin to appear on the surface
prove the existence of a fist
which threatens our destiny and squeezes our hopes.
What are your suggestions for our liberation?
—Shall we stay close together?
—We will be smothered by the strain of togetherness.
—Shall we ask a higher power for help?
—No one will hear our shouts through this enveloping shell.
—Shall we wait for a savior?
—We will rot before anyone thinks of us.
—Then we should stand in circles, like impossible holes.
Before the circles were completed, a hole began to open by itself.
We wanted to dance a dabka,
but a worm reared its head over the terrified seeds.
The pomegranate began to shake,
a great crack appeared on the surface.
Some of the seeds trembled inside the human fist,
others were stripped off onto the ground…
I am still suspended in the cavity
and the worm lies in ambush for me…
With One Look From Him
He broke the frame…
With one look, he broke it.
The yel
low emerged bearing disease.
The blue emerged with one foot in the sea
and one in the sky.
The red emerged as wars.
The white emerged with braids.
The black emerged as the disgrace of his friend.
The green emerged looking back.
The inside became the outside.
I emerged inside the empty canvas.
With one look from him
I emerged.
An Orange
From another star
I roll endlessly
and sink deeper in the river
of no return.
With invisible nets
I catch whatever numbers I find
and scatter them all to zero.
I sit on top of death
like a pile of smoke
and cry
because the orange peeled
from our laughter
is not the globe of the earth.
THREE
FROM THE PSALMS OF ABSENCE
(1993)
Behind the Glass
Today…
everything hangs on a bulletin board.
The scene ages in ruins
and the audience, divided by war,
reunites in the absence.
The curtain falls
on the day’s last shiver.
The moon is an aspirin tablet.
The villages are perforated like memory,
the sky a cap for airplanes
with no room for birds.
I flow wing-like behind a glass
that exchanges endless brokenness with me
for a universe of darkness
that splinters into the non-horizon.
I watch the dead rise from the glass
like rainbows.
Shall we give the air
another lung
or remain behind the glass
from one demise to another?
I borrow false feet
from the amoebae
and depart.
I dream of the vanishing point
and weightlessness,
but dream is an out-dated word
like my sadness in the presence
of the universe’s last day.
Today,
everything hangs on a bulletin board.
The Nun
The mountains are changeable,
the nun left the convent:
She doesn’t understand geography.
The church bells are dead,
the nun took the shape of a circle:
She rings.
The prayers are repeated,
the nun broke up into her original stones:
She recites the Act of Forgetfulness.
Eternity is at a loss,
the nun sways between the sea and the sky:
She thinks of another blueness.
The New Year
1
There is a knock at the door.
How disappointing…
It is the New Year and not you.
2
I don’t know how to add your absence to my life.
I don’t know how to subtract myself from it.
I don’t know how to divide it
among the laboratory flasks.
3
Time stopped at twelve o’clock
and confused the watchmaker.
There were no flaws with the watch.
It was just a matter of the hands
which embraced and forgot the world.
Transformations of the Child and the Moon
FIRST IMAGE
The child raised his head to see
the moon concealed
behind the building.
Their shadows chased each other.
The building didn’t know
who jumped first
to paint a red puddle
under the child’s feet.
SECOND IMAGE
The child went to the river,
and as a likeness to a mirror,
the child sank
into the river’s drowning moon.
THIRD IMAGE
The child raced on the beach
chasing the falling ball of the sky,
while the sand counted
the footprints of the moon
carrying the child to heaven.
The Chaldean’s Ruins
Ascetic,
he emerges from her belly to the grave.
His days are not entered on the calendar,
and he does not gather the things that are scattered.
Earthquakes do not move him nor wink at death without him.
Was he born before the earth
or after her wails?
A wind blew by
and did not shake the tree.
They said: It was no wind,
but his sighing.
He is the unsettled Chaldean
and it was no tree,
but the elongated roots of his village.
Dried out,
he releases water into the fields
then brays on the hill.
During the day he is content with darkness.
Homeless,
exile squeezes him
and discards his rind
to the skyscrapers.
Waiting,
he lights a candle before the Virgin.
Perhaps she will shift the borders toward him.
Hallelujah… Hallelujah…
He celebrates the coming of his sheep
and holds a vigil at their graves
until morning comes.
Bewildered,
he turns the mountains between his hands
searching for a speck of homeland.
Far from his tent,
he tightens the ropes
and accumulates like sand
in distant countries.
Preserved
in a can, he writes on his forehead:
MADE IN RUINS
and feels that the word “ruins”
is enough to refer to
what has happened
or what remains.
The Shadow of a Tear
In a time of quick greetings
and artificial lights,
the shadow of a tear
falls across the sky.
Neither the rushing wheels
nor the road
nor the eraser
can stop it.
Above the branches
fly careless birds.
One lags behind the flock,
but don’t worry.
He will catch up in a little while;
he is only distracted
by the shadow of a tear
broken on the branches.
Pronouns
He plays a train.
She plays a whistle.
They move away.
He plays a rope.
She plays a tree.
They swing.
He plays a dream.
She plays a feather.
They fly.
He plays a general.
She plays people.
They declare war.
NOTES
PAGE
11 Inanna: Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and war; the first goddess of recorded history.
Abu Al-Tubar: “The hatchet man,” a serial killer in Baghdad during the 1970s who was later discovered to be an evil hand of the Baathist regime.
13 Lynndie: Lynndie England, one of the seven U.S. army reservists prosecuted in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Photographs showed her and other U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees. Whether or not they acted under orders of the Pentagon and the White House is still under investigation.
18 Martyrs’ Monument: The Monument of Saddam’s Qadissiya Martyrs, designed by the sculptor Ismaayl Fatah Al-Turk, commemorates the Iraqi soldiers who died during the Iran-Iraq War. After the U.S. occupation of Iraq, its site was tur
ned into an American military base.
34 and the river wriggles between us / like a well-cooked fish: A reference to how restaurants along the Tigris cook fish by constantly turning it over a wood fire.
41 Laheeb: Laheeb Numan, a trial lawyer in Baghdad who was imprisoned and tortured for standing up in court against Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. Nevertheless, after the U.S.-led overthrow of Hussein’s government, she organized a children’s protest against the occupation.
51 The cup moved—1996: About “The Cup,” Mikhail says: “This poem was written and published in 1994. By chance, in 1996, I arrived in America. I didn’t know the significance of 1996 when I wrote the poem, but later realized it came true for me. I mean that my life was changed forever in 1996.”
61 dabka: A popular traditional folk dance of the Arabic-speaking world.
Copyright © 1993, 1997, 2000, 2005 by Dunya Mikhail
Translation copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Winslow
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Some of these poems were first published in Poetry International, Mtzna, Modern Poetry in Translation, Circumference, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today.
Book design by Sylvia Frezzolim Severance
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as New Directions Paperbook 1006 in 2005
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
eISBN 978-0-8112-2527-4
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
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