this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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from the article:
Alone and the river before me
I have a suspicious heart, brother, and a blind statue, and the news that amateur refugees brought from Baghdad stunned me there’s a lot they haven’t seen yet they were crossing the bridge by chance
intentions are in the ports befuddled as their owners left them, incomplete as the murdered left them and where our friend, the one you know, pointed, we went without a moan or groan
our country is far and intentions good
we left, as exiles leave, houses more beautiful than the roads and women more faithful than passers-by we weren’t discouraged and our will wasn’t stolen
we dreamt, as residents dream, of roads more beautiful than the houses of women who furnished our bodies and altered our language though this took us neither to hill nor sea
an infantry marching out of some front appeared we heard its drone but didn’t see it, and with worn-out eyes and cracked feet they shook off the mud over the marble and dried their boots on the billboards of the ‘founding father’
we watched as if we had seen nothing, heard nothing
and it was possible to remember their lustful dreams, chase the ghosts and touch the buttocks of women to be sure it was just a dream!
but there’s no mercy for the dead in these cold corners no reward for those who are in the know
there’s only listening to the mountain where caves are born and darkness grows like a carnivorous plant…
the cry of the birds at the bursting dawn didn’t overtake us we didn’t stumble over the wisdom or obsessions of our predecessors though what we saw is worth telling!
… and then a bunch of slaves started climbing out of a hole, up the walls even if the doors were wide open they climbed down to the city, roamed its markets men and children were shouting in the dark swatting it with drums and dancing, women undressing on the edge of an abyss to distract death from their children as one of the locals explained to us
we felt grateful for our exile and residence
and said to ourselves: we are only marching exiles, our shadows don’t trail us over the earth and like textile workers we hold threads and spin them to weave memories that breathe behind us and follow our steps like bewildered dogs
who are we that we should dislike what we don’t know or love what we have no business in!
then a jealous boy appeared: his jealousy remained glistening on the fence after he left and it blocked the path of cats, pedestrians, and the scent of basil after the amateur refugees, with the news from Baghdad, had gone
his jealousy leaned on the breasts of a young woman who came out of the shadows and took off her veil, placed it on the grass by the soldiers’ boots just as I was moving to another dream …
all this would have been worthy of consideration and repetition had a young philosopher from Ramallah not died at 4:16 that morning surrounded by his students, admirers, and three friends (two men and a woman) it would have been possible also to remember and add other scattered things so grief can appear and treason mature
chief among them Buddha’s lilac statue
or the photograph of a house owner in his furnished living room staring at us out of his conservative classical death
the father’s hermetic contemplation a complicity of sorts with the daughter as he expires beneath the oxygen apparatus
a woman’s voice as she conceals her infidelity through the phone’s ten thick layers
it would have been possible to document his death or to remember other scattered things in another context, like his dead weight or the white of his eyes resembling a final resurrection before the sirens were lit
if only he did not stand a bit crooked from the world, as happened with Cavafy whose poetry he did not concern himself with as he did other poets
I have a suspicious heart, brother and my stance is whole there is no one who can guess the whirling in my head and I no longer trust those night travelers!
&&&
I have a suspicious heart and my admirers are obstinate and in the wadis if you look closely are birds and hunters who wear in the dark longing’s smell and its form
hunters who have other motives in the light other labyrinths and paths that make a hyena pant and the signifier and the signified are lost
among them: wind-instrument blowers
wily attars in the markets
barefoot narrators behind the slaves
and pretentious mockers standing on their bank where we were born white from black fathers
there are among them more than enough to make me superfluous…
my guests are blind and dervishes as aforementioned I describe them as they appeared in secret as blessed and guarded narrators born with absent minds but if absently they died they’d notice
in meaning they have a jinn’s rank and its language and in structure a paranoid’s body and levity
…and for some reason I can’t quite recall now he moved a little away, turned his back to me and stared at the river and said: I have nothing left to give you except this: and pointed to the water then wiped my face with his hands
I became alert and imagined I was in a garden in Baghdad whose fence I had passed by when I was a kid… and there was in the dark a fishing boat a soft paddle transmitting the scent of sparks from across the river quiet sounds coming from the brothel, and all this seemed to me like breathing… what I don’t see as it has gathered
I rose and looked around and there I was alone and the river before me, with two maidens in it, one black, the other white and whenever I slept or was distracted he would come, sit before me, talk to me and I would listen, then he’d wipe his hands with my face and I’d awaken, transported from one land to another land one time to another time…
until I reached the Tigris bank that night where the two maidens were and I realized the state I had been in, and longed for those I’d left behind
so I composed these lines for the occasion:
I raise your secret to all expose mine to man and jinn I light a fire of jasmine and chase a dream of fleeing mirth I gather behind you the crowd’s shadow a salaam of vanishing to the vanished and in pleasure I am alluring and in sleep I see the invisible as if I were your radiance and you my whirling spell I played and spun the soul of life as one seeks a plaything and let loose prophetic horses and rode drunker than a drunk so here I am before you a triumph brought to the victor you’re all I have as I’m paraded the pleased around his benefactor
I elevated him higher in my prayers and embellished his favours then remembered what he had told me as he was bidding me farewell:
‘as for that which you did not ask me about it’s your secret, no one else’s and it doesn’t concern me I neither help you with it nor release you from it’
and I had asked him about all things but this!
he had tutored me when I was a kid, I would repeat whatever he said three times before the rooster crowed, I would listen then repeat what he had said twice and by the third time I’d add to it my own.