Mural

  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

  As if I’m not made of me

  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 br />
  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