Return to the clouds and bring the carefree days
An echo said:
Nothing returns save the mighty past of the strong on their obelisks …
their traces in gold
and the prayers of the weak addressed to tomorrow
Give us our daily bread
and a stronger now
for there’s neither reincarnation nor home nor eternity for us
An echo said:
I’m fed up with my incurable hope
sick of aesthetic traps: what is there after Babel?
The more the road clears to heaven
and the unknown reveals a final goal
the more the prose becomes prayer-like
and the song shatters
Green
The land of my poem is green and high
coming to me from the bed of my precipice
Strange you are
It’s enough that you alone are there
to become a tribe …
I sang in order to feel the wasted horizon in the pain of a dove
not to explain what God says to man
I’m no prophet
I don’t proclaim that my fall is an ascent
I am the stranger from all I was given by my language
And if I’ve given my affections to Arabic
They have surrendered me to the feminine participle
And the words when far
are a land bordering a distant star
And the words when near
are an exile
And writing is not enough for me to declare:
I found my presence filling in absence
and whenever I searched for myself I found others
and whenever I searched for them I found only myself
the stranger
Am I a crowd of one?
I am the stranger
Obliged to cross the Milky Way seeking the beloved
Condemned by his gifts
that ruin appearances
The form shrinks the words get bigger
and go beyond the needs of my vocabulary
And in mirrors I look at myself:
Am I him?
Did I perform my role well in the last act?
Did I read the play before the performance?
or was it imposed on me?
Am I a performer?
or the dupe who changed the lines to live the post-modern
when the writer deserts his text and both actor and audience leave?
I sit behind the door and watch:
Am I him?
It’s my language
Its voice has the sting of my blood
but the author is someone else
I am not me if I come and don’t arrive
if I speak and don’t utter
I am the one to whom dark letters say:
Write to be!
Read to discover!
And if you wish to speak do so
with your opposites united in meaning …
and your transparent self the main verse
I am surrounded by mariners with no port
A squall has bereft me of verbs and signs
I haven’t had time to establish my exact position
I haven’t asked about the strange resemblance of the two doors
Exit and Entrance
and I can’t find a corpse to hunt for life
or a voice to shout:
O time in a hurry!
You kidnapped me with the words of a dark alphabet:
the real is the only sure thing imagined
O time that won’t wait …
Won’t wait for one who was late for his birth
Make from the past the only thing you say to us,
Your future
Like it was when we were friends
and not the victims of your chariot
without leading it without being led by it
I have seen what the dead remember and forget …
They don’t grow up
They know what time it is by their wrist watches
And don’t give a damn for our death or their lives
for what I was or will be
With them everything dissolves
He into me I into you
There’s neither whole nor parts
No one living says to the dead: be me!
… elements like feelings dissolve
But I don’t see my body there
I’m in neither the fullness of my death
nor the fullness of my first life
Who am I?
The deceased or the newborn?
Time is at zero
I wasn’t thinking of birth when death carried me into chaos
I was neither living nor dead
And there is no nothingness or being
My nurse says: you are better now
And injects me with a tranquilizer:
Be calm
and worthy of what you’re about to dream
even a little …
I saw my French doctor
open my prison cell
and beat me with a stick
assisting him were two local policemen
I saw my father return
from the Hajj
fainted from the Hijazi sunstroke
he said to the flock of angels surrounding him:
Extinguish me!
I saw Moroccan boys playing soccer
pelting me with stones:
Pass your word back and scram!
and leave us our mother
O father trespassing in the cemetery!
I saw Rene Char
sitting with Heidegger
two metres away from me
I saw them drinking wine
not looking for poetry
The dialogue was a ray of light
And there was a passer-by waiting
I saw three comrades weeping
as they were sewing me a shroud
with gold thread
I saw Ma’ari expel his critics
from his poem
I’m not blind
To see what you all see
Vision is a light that leads to nothingness … or madness
I saw countries embrace my good mornings saying:
Be worthy of the bread’s aroma
May the flowers of the pavement make you elegant
There’s still fire on your mother’s hearth
And the welcome is as warm as bread!
Green
The land of my poem is green
One stream is enough to make me whisper to the butterfly:
O sister
One stream is enough to solder the ancient myths onto the falcon’s wing as it swaps banners for distant peaks
there where armies have founded for me a kingdom of oblivion
There is no nation smaller than its poem
But weapons make words too big for the living
and the dead who inhabit the living
And letters make the sword on the dawn’s belt glitter
til the desert becomes parched for songs or drowns in them
No life is long enough for me to join my end to my beginning
The shepherds took my story and hid it in the grass
covering the magic debris where the tents once stood
and like this with trumpets and choral rhymes they cheated oblivion
then left me the hoarseness of memory on the stone of farewell
And they didn’t return …
Pastoral our days are pastoral between city and tribe
I can’t find a secret night for your saddle studded with mirages
You said to me: without you why do I need a name?
Call me
for I created you when you named me
and you killed me once you owned the name
How could you kill me?
Me the outcast of all this night
Let me enter the forest of your desire
Embrace me, hold me, squeeze me til
I shed pure nuptial honey on the hive
Scatter me with the breeze in your hands then gather me up
The night renders up its soul to you Intruder
and a star can’t see me without knowing how my family will kill me with rosewater
So give me the sudden happiness that needs me
and I will break my jar with my own hands
You suggest I change my path?
I didn’t say anything – my life is beyond me
I’m the me saying:
The last poem fell from my date palms
I travel within myself
besieged by contradictions
And life is worth the candle of its mystery
and its prophetic birds
I wasn’t born to know I was going to die
but to love what’s in God’s shadow
Beauty takes me to the beautiful
And I love your love
freed from itself and its signs
I am my alternative
I am the one who says to himself:
From the smallest things are born the largest thoughts
Rhythm doesn’t come from the words
but from the joining of two bodies in a long night …
I’m the one talking to himself to tame memory … are you me?
You, me and the third which is the two of us
fluttering between and declaring, don’t forget!
O our death! Take us then
so we can learn to shine …
On me there’s no sun or moon
I left my gloom hanging on a branch of a boxthorn
and the place weighed less
As my fugitive spirit took to the sky
I’m the me saying:
O girl what did the longed-for ones do to you?
The breeze ruffles and carries us like autumn scents
My woman you grew on my crutches
And now they’ll speed you on your way
sure-sighted to Damascus
A guardian angel and two doves fly over what’s left of our lives
And the land is a festival …
The land is a festival of the vanquished and we are among them
It’s we who brought the anthem here
camping in the wind like an old eagle’s feather
We were good and pious without Christ’s teachings
and stronger than the grass at summer’s end
You are my truth and I your question
We have inherited nothing but our names
And you are my playground and I your shade
at the crossroads of the anthem
We weren’t there when the saints and their magic and malice got into the anthem
On the horns of a mountain goat they carried the place from its time to another time
It would have been more natural if the stars in our sky were a fraction higher than the stones in our well
and the prophets less nagging
Then the soldiers could have heard our praises
Green
The land of my poem is green
The song carries her as she was
fertile from past to past
And I have of her: Narcissus contemplating the water of his image
And I have of her: the sharpness of shadows in synonyms and the exactitude of meaning …
And I have of her: what is common in the sayings of prophets on the roof of the night
And I have of her: the donkey of wisdom abandoned on a hill, mocking her legends and her reality …
And I have of her: the symbols stuffed with opposites
Realism doesn’t find memories
Abstraction doesn’t lead to illumination
My other self I have of her
Singers can only inscribe her days in a diary:
If the dream isn’t enough
I’ll be heroically sleepless at the door of exile
And I have of her: the echo of my language from the walls
removing salt from the sea
at the very moment when my strong heart betrays me
Higher than the valley was my wisdom
When I told the devil: No, don’t test me!
Don’t give me your either-ors
Leave me in the Old Testament climbing to heaven
there is my kingdom
Take hold of history O son of my father
take history and make with guesses what you need
And I have tranquillity
A small grain of wheat will be enough for us
for me and my brother the enemy
Since my hour hasn’t yet come
nor the hour of the harvest
I must embrace absence, listen to my heart and follow it
to Kana in Galilee
My hour has not yet come
Perhaps something in myself rejects me
Perhaps I am someone else
The figs are not yet ripe around the girls’ dresses
and from the feather of the ostrich I have not yet been born
Nobody is waiting for me there
I have come before and I have come after
I find nobody who believes what I see
I the one who sees
am far away
The faraway
My me who are you?
We are two on the road
and one at the resurrection
Take me to the light of my disappearance to see how I’ll be in my other mirror
Who my me will I be after you?
Is my body behind me or before you?
Who am I you tell me?
Make me as I make you
anoint me with almond oil
crown me with cedar
and transport me from the valley to a white eternity
Teach me life on the way
test me like an atom in the heavens
come to my aid against the boredom of the eternal
and be lenient when the roses pierce from my veins and wound me …
Our hour has not yet come
No prophet counts time with a fistful of late grass
Has time closed its circle?
No angels visit the place so poets can leave their past behind on the dusk’s horizon
and open by hand their tomorrows
Sing again Anat darling goddess
my first poem about genesis
Storytellers have already found the willow’s
birth certificate in the autumn stone
and shepherds their well in the depth of a song
And time has already come for those who play with meaning
on a butterfly’s wing caught in rhymes
So sing darling goddess
I am both the prey Anat and the arrows
I am words
the funeral oration the call of the muezzin
and the martyr
I haven’t said goodbye to the ruins yet
So don’t be what I was except once
once was enough to see how time collapses itself like a bedouin tent
in a wind from the north
How places split apart and the what-has-gone wears the litter of a deserted temple
Everything around me looks like me
and I look like nothing here
As if the earth is too small for the lyrically sick
descendents of the poor crazy devils who when they had a good dream
taught love poetry to a parrot
and saw all frontiers open …
I want to live …
I have work to do on deck
not to save birds from our famines or sea sickness
but to study the deluge close-up
And after?
What do survivors do with the ancient land?
Do they take up the same story?
How did it begin?
What’s the epilog
ue?
No one comes back from death to tell us the truth …
Wait for me Death beyond the earth
Wait for me on your land
until I finish my talk with what’s left of my life
not far from your tent
Wait for me til I finish reading Tarafa bin al Abed
The existentialists who drew up from the well of each moment
freedom
justice
the wine of the gods …
They seduce me
So wait Death til I have settled the funeral arrangements in the clear spring of my birth
and have forbidden the orators to lyricise again
about the sad land and the steadfastness of figs and olives in the face of time’s armies
Dissolve me I’d say in all the femininity of the letter “nuun”1
Let me gulp down the Sura of the Merciful in the Qur’an
And walk with me in my ancestors’ footsteps
silently to the rhythm of a flute
towards my eternity
And don’t place a violet on my grave
it’s the flower of the depressed
and reminds the dead of how love died too young
Place seven ears of green wheat on my coffin and a few red anemones should you find them
otherwise leave the church roses for churches and newly-weds
Wait til I pack my bag Death
my toothbrush soap after-shave and some clothes
Is the climate warm over there?
Do the seasons change in the eternal whiteness?
Or does the weather stay fixed in autumn or winter?
Will one book be enough to read in non-time?
Or should I take a library?
And what do they talk over there?
vernacular or classical?
Death wait for me Death
til I clear my mind in Spring
and regain my health
Then you’ll be the noble hunter who doesn’t kill the gazelle while it’s drinking
Let’s be friendly and open together
I’ll give you my well-filled life
and you give me a view of the planets
No one exactly dies
Rather souls change their looks and address
Death my shadow who will lead me
You the third in two
You hesitant colour of sapphires and topaz
You blood of the peacock
You poacher of a fox’s heart
You, our delirium!
Sit
Put down your hunting things outside under the awning
Hang your set of heavy keys above the door!
You Mighty One stop looking at my veins monitoring the last drop
You are mightier than medicine
mightier than the respirator
mightier than pungent honey
You don’t need to kill me – my sickness will
Why not be nobler than the insects?
Be transparently yourself
a visible message to be read by the invisible