Ghassan Zaqtan - 33 poems

a town with no bar to drown all my sorrows,
a place where no one even knows I exist!

I must move on surreptitiously,
with no regrets nor bitterness….

I don't have a place in the official celebrations,
nor a seat of my own in the gardens.

Those birds have shown me the way:
I may not have a horse

but I have nothing to fear
there are no walls around me….

But I must leave at once!
I must throw its old laws to the dogs,

and grind its traditions in the dirt,
then slip away, under cover of darkness….

It was night the first time I got here —
the days before my hair had turned grey —

I fetched up here adrift and mixed up,
as rootless as a houseplant in a tub.

In those days my stride was firm,
and my voice never wavered,

In those days I never fell silent….
Now I'm exhausted by the gossip of this place,

I'm worn out by the corruption,
by those obtuse, hotheaded women

by the drunken, deluded parades every night,
by the babbling old men, the fanatics wailing and repenting….

I must get out!
I must shake this town's dust from my feet….

So while the shepherds return from the well,
while the indolent elders sneak back from their dens,

while the preachers come out of the darkness,
and the windows slam shut in the sandstorm,

by the time they are wallowing in their dreams
and the lines become blurred

between the sacred and the profane,
where day becomes night….

— I'll be away on the far side of the valley,
by the edge of the cedar woods, on top of the hill.

Four sisters
climb the hill alone
in black clothes.
Four sisters sigh
facing the thicket.
Four sisters in the dark
read wet letters.
A train coming
from Artouf* passed
behind the picture.
A horse carrying
a girl from Zakaria*
neighs on the ridge
across the plain.
In the gorge
clouds slowly pass.
Four sisters
from Zakaria, alone
in black clothes
on the hill.

How clear it was the singing of the Moroccans who were swimming
on the river's face before sunset, the women who leaned on the bridge
among their children and vegetable baskets and tombs of saints…

Distant Rabat with its people where al-Andalus hides,
Rabat, whenever I say I shall leave its halls, I spread for my will a rug
and it spreads a rug

O Fatima
if only you would lean my way
or remember me,
that was the river's song,
my heart would quiver
and you'd make me happy
and the gazelle in the hills
would find its way…
but Fatima was only a song
released by boats
and dead women on the bridge
in the nights of Rabat.

In the year two thousand or a little before, there maybe was
a prelude that inhabited me, it resembled summer
in the rooms of bachelors,
I used to spin it in my speech…

Like a pleasant gait on en edge of marble or its dusting
from what the hoofs of mules leave behind
as they climb up the wadi…

'…in my house
women give birth to rings
and disappear from the world behind the door,
here is the paradise of the one I love
and the journey
of the one who saw…'

A prelude like other preludes
I didn't retrieve from muttering

Like a straw bird
It follows me…

I have a tune in the melody
with which I did not arrive
but it is my only gold
and means

It has the probability of improvisation
the tenderness of verbs
and the solidity of narration

As if secret builders Cavafy had awakened
were passing through the hills
and started digging by my pillow!

In the house of cactus
I finish what I started

Nature that has left me hopeless
became arid in the fields

my abandoned homes in others' memories and feats
the girls on the pier
with ill-intent as they wait for me

the wolf's dream in its wilderness
the hyena desiring me and its neighbor

the cypress I tallied
the roads I folded

become distant and similar
while I forget and remember

I, who exaggerated everything,

go as alone as my mother had birthed me
and sit in my icon.

Aside form her fingers, she got no sleep
she was there suspended in remembrance
patching up their dreams in a dim light

while
one bell was crimping the path to her house
one patient bell ascending the hillside
of junkyard and convent

One bell was limping behind the fence
and the Muslim cemetery
and passing in the privacy of jinn and sleeping dead
by the springs on the boulevards of birds

One bell for stranger women
for the few wishes and for summer

for old outfits and school books
and boys dead by the attic doors

One bell ascending the hill behind the ancient time
behind the shrubs on the foot-slope
where old dogs are tucked in the story
and the houses are gathered in the patient air

One bell was calling her by her name while ascending
perhaps to see her letter cursive
above the pine grove

There's a helpless woman in his sleep
a recluse woman preoccupied with simple thoughts
and needless accessories