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from the article:

When You Land at Ben-Gurion Airport

a convocation of desert eagles rises from your spleen, each one carrying a stone—this one to mark the blood leaving your body, your face now a milk white grotto, & one from the basilica in your heart destroyed, in part, by your own uprising, & one for the rebuilding, & one keystone for the door of humility that prevents others from entering on horseback, one from the depths of your bowels which are the shepherds’ fields, one from the cave where they buried children if one could use buried here, one from the settlement, from the valley of fire, the souq, the emerald-domed city, for the fresh catch (your great grandfather’s favorite), one for the sky- rocketing population, one for the giving & one for the taking away, one for each name for flock: a conclave, a radiance, a swim, for each name for flock you now know: congress, flamboyance, siege, sedge, scattering, for each name for flock you now know & use as a remembrance: an omniscience, a rush, a trembling, an ascension, a colony. One for the first city to fly the flag, the world’s oldest city, & one from the cistern, dry for millennia, now beginning to fill.

for my children

from the article:

If He Were Not a Star

ولو لَمْ يكن نجماً لما كانَ باظري وقد غبتُ عنهُ مُظلماً بعد نورِهِ سـلامٌ على تلك المحاسنِ من شَجٍ تناءت بنعماه وطيبِ سرورِهِ

If he were not a star I’d be unaware, now he’s gone, that I’m here floating in the black.

Do we wish peace upon the lights who leave us, longing for the warmth of illumination?

Beggar

سار شعري لك عنّى زائراَ فأَعرْ سَمْعَ المعالى شِنْفَهُ وكذاك الروضُ إذْ لم يَسْتطعْ زَورةً أَرْسَلَ عنه عَرْفَهُ

I sent my poem to visit you, a beggar before majesty— like scents affected from a garden: Reaching, yet touchless.

Jamil & Buthaina

أزوركَ أم تزورُ فإنَّ قلبي إلى ما تشتهي أبداً يميلُ فثَغري موردٌ عذبٌ زلالٌ وفَرْعُ ذُؤَابتي ظِلٌ ظَليلُ وقد أَمَّلتُ أن تظما وتَضْحَى إذا وافى إليك بيَ المقِيلُ فَعَجل بالجوابِ فما جميلٌ أنَاتُك عن بُثينةَ يا جميلُ

Come for me or shall I come to you for my inclination curls toward whatever you prefer

So let me be the recess to restore you and my embrace be the branches that melt you into shadow

I wish only that my sacrifice stirs in you a sough satisfying enough to stifle any slander

Now give me a lovely mouthed reply so I may elude being the latest adulterous iteration of Buthaina beholden to her Jamil

Again

ثنائي على تلكَ الثّنايا لأنّني أقول على علم وأنطق عن خُبْرِ وأُنصفها لا أكذبُ الله إنّني رشفتُ بها ريقاً أرقَّ مِنَ الخمرِ

You come to come again. I know you know these folds.

Tell me true, tell me something. I love sipping your words, thinner than wine.

Undeserving

سـلامٌ يفتحُ في زهرةِ ال كمامَ ويُنْطِقُ وُرقَ الغصونْ على بازح قد ثَوَى في الحَشا وإن كان تحرم منهُ الجفونْ فـلا تحسبوا البُعدَ يُنسيكمُ فذلكَ والله ما لا يَكونْ

your peace opens me to phosphor, to unmuzzle as yet unpronounced blooms even in eyelids deprived of vision or the dispossessed sheltering in the soil forget distance, my ardor’s as undiminishing as God’s to we, the undeserving

---

Translator’s Note:

Ḥafṣa bint al-Ḥājj ar-Rukūniyya was born around the year 530 AH (1135 CE) to a wealthy family in the city of Granada, which underwent substantive sociopolitical changes during her lifetime after the Almohad invasion that occurred when she was still a child. She famously initiated an affair with Abū Ja’far, a court poet also serving as secretary to the Almohad governor who unfortunately also fell in love with Ḥafṣa. According to legend, court politics and jealousies led Abū Ja’far to side with a rebellion that ended with his capture and execution. Before his death, he often sent Ḥafṣa customary love poems, to which she responded in varied tones (sometimes coy, sometimes passionate, sometimes cerebral), showcasing her famed range as a poet. She spent her last years, after leaving her homeland, in Marrakesh where she tutored young noblewomen. Although only around 60 lines of her poetry have survived to the present, Ḥafṣa (along with Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī and Nuzhawn bint al-Qilāʿī al-Ghirnātiyya) has long been acclaimed as one of the three greatest of women poets in the Andalusian tradition. Ḥafṣa’s remarkably enigmatic style not only has drawn scores of readers to her work but also has allowed for vastly different translating interpretations of her work over the centuries.

Translator Will Pewitt teaches global literature at the University of North Florida and publishes in a variety of genres, from poetry and fiction to history and philosophy. More of his work can be found at WPewitt.com.

from the article:

This Is How I Want to Die

Who could die like that cloud that I watch, softly evaporate white and airy to the firmament rising on light, atmospheric wings.

Who could die like the star, eclipsing a few moments, and then no more to shine again, like her, in other blue-clad firmaments!

Who could be aurora ray and, in afternoon’s decline, diffuse into twilight burning gold the moribund light as it waves goodbye!

Who could be wilting flower painlessly bending one’s chalice and even pale and inert, shedding petals and spilling ambrosia into the aura!

But I am no flower, no errant cloud, No star of blinking worlds… I have a heart, a caring soul, pieces all, made to be torn out!

This is why I want to be weightless atom, perfumed breath of breeze, to fool suffering and die exhaling grins.

That in your bosom no more, Nature, death is a voluptuous fainting, rather a pretty expression; and not a single thing into eternal repose sinking.

from the article:

Grotto

Before the gravitation: strong men. Sturdy. Song and cadence.

Before the melody a fissure in the moss. Precision and fall.

Before the performance someone was already singing the water’s pulse.

                                                      _Underworld_.

Every year the circus brings a tiger. White. Crestfallen.

Before the gravitation the children already entranced. Magic scatters (shoulders) along the bank. Enchantment of broken savagery.

And those thighs.

Siberia would have been an eternal landscape but no. No. For the girl, the enchantment would be born in spring.

             _**Je pars en voyage sur les ailes.**_

Reserves and borders where thighs and femurs are only ciphers.

Every year the circus exhibits the biggest beetle in the world.

A man writes a single line on the bank: Thighs. On your thighs, in them, the designated territory.

The performance of the Hans Heiling overture.

The tiger is a slice of the desert on fire, brought to life by your eyes. White. Crestfallen.

Clearing away the scraps / creature dotted with edges / the execution, of a man.

      _Perform the background music._

The woman (concert musician) blows kisses to the crowd.

from the article:

Only Poem

Sea with neither name nor shore, endless ocean which I dreamt, infinite and arcane, like space, like times.

I wound its waves, old mother of life, death, as waves perish and emerge reborn. How much dying, how many births inside immortal death!… Playing a game of cradles and graves, she was alone.

Suddenly, a wandering bird crossed the stretch of vertical sea: “Chojé!… Chojé!…” it said, a whining stain flying by.

Then lost in the distance, dripping: “Chojé!… Chojé!…”

I awoke, atop the waves and flew away.

…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.

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

from the article:

New York

Triumphs the light, capitalized by Edison in the virginal bosom of the ‘ferry-boat.’ Skyscrapers, ‘Five-cents’ built, how many projects crash against your walls!

Within you they all roar, “Oh, great New York!” The machinery and the hunger; Statue of Liberty, your light, is not for the South. Cut off your arm.

from the article:

A Longing for Vengeance

Powerful apparition of hurricanes, violent, like this grief that shakes me! Come, rile me up! Come, with your breath stoke like a flame my mind!

Let lightning hiss and with a clamor crack, while—like dry leaf, like wilted flower— the gust of your breath, the oak fells. Broken and castoff, into the roaring river!

From this soul that invokes and follows you, envying, as she does, the vastness of your devastation, sowing on every side, strange confusions.

Come…to the twisted pain that devours her, unleash your cruelty, and dry the tears that coward weeps!

from the article:

Nightfall

When the sun, behind the mountain, is extinguished and twilight says, “silence,” and the mists shroud the valley, of the sun for mourning;

of the afternoon, in brief agony, when, upon ribs, moans the wind, like lighthouses on high, are lit trembling stars.

By their light, veiled by the subtle gauze of daydreams, I divine another earth, happy peaceful and mysterious.

And on the road to the dreamt-up country, A star—my star—from afar, Seems to light up the longed-for shore of heaven.

from the article:

Untitled

THEY: It’s the humid the bleak season YOU: A new spring THEY: The empty desert of life YOU: A smiling flower bed THEY: The secret the lie YOU: The message the truth THEY: The asphyxiation the prison bars YOU: The oxygen the pure air THEY: The iron of hate YOU: The gold of love THEY: The sword YOU: A dove THEY: The rage YOU: A smile THEY: The slap YOU: A kiss THEY: The night YOU: A star THEY: A splinter YOU: A scarf THEY: It is nothing nothing nothing YOU: Everything everything everything

from the article:

The Siege of Huexotzinco

She is besieged, she is despised, the city of Huexotzinco: With weapons she is encircled, pierced by darts, Huexotzinco.

Roar the tortoise-shell drums in your home, in Huexotzinco Where Tecayehuatzin rules, and where sings his song and plays his flute prince Quecehuatl, in his home, Huexotzinco

Listen: our father has come down, Camaxtli, for in the house of Tigers, the drum thunders echoing the song of tortoise-shell drums.

Only so, flowers petals tear down pillars torn and dragged away are their fine clothes all the city kept, safe in her coffer, city of Camaxtli

Consumed by the fire now, your houses built of precious stones My houses too, of treasured books, all that was your home, Oh Camaxtli!