Fatherhood
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen
Poems
Seaview Press
South Australia, Australia 2009
Printed by : Salmat Document Management Solutions Pty Limited
South Australia
Cover photograph by Shamsaldin Hama
Author: Kamal Ad-Deen, Adeeb
Title: Fatherhood- Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen
About the Author
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen (Iraq -1953) is a poet, journalist and translator who has degrees in Economics and English Literature from the University of Baghdad plus a Diploma of Interpreting (Arabic-English) from Adelaide Institute of TAFE, South Australia. He has published ten poetry collections and won the major prize of Iraqi poetry in 1999. His poetry has been translated into many languages and reviewed by many Iraqi, Tunisian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Yemeni and Moroccan critics and published in "Man of Letters: 33 critics write about Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen's poetry" (edited by Dr. Migdad Rahim). He has translated into Arabic short stories and poems from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, China and the USA.
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen now lives in Australia as an Australian citizen and was a special guest at Friendly Street Poets in Adelaide in 2004 and at the Gallery de la Catessen in Adelaide in 2006. Some of his featured poems have been published in "The Best Australian Poems 2007" (edited by Peter Rose) and in many Australian websites, magazines and books, such as "Southerly", "Meanjin" and "Friendly Street Poets.
His website: www.adeebk.com
Translated by Professor Aabdulwahed Muhammed and the poet.
Acknowledgment
-The poems: "Boredom", "An Attempt at Remembrance", "An Attempt at Music" and "Time Runs, Time Drowns" appeared in "Southerly" Magazine (Vol .64, No. 1, 2004), (edited by Rosie Scott and Thomas Keneally).
-"An Attempt at the Bullet" appeared in " "Friendly Street Poets: Thirty" (edited by Louise Nicholas and Rob Walker) 2005 and appeared as Featured Poem in Friendly Street Poets' website.
- "Theft" appeared in "Southerly" Magazine (Vol. 66. No.1, 2006).
- "The Man" appeared in "Beyond the Rainbow" (No. 28, 2006).
-"Sleeplessness" appeared in "Meanjin" Magazine (Vol .66, No. 2, 2007) and in "The Best Australian Poems 2007" (edited by Peter Rose).
-"Fire and Sinbad" appeared in “Culture is …" an anthology (edited by Anne-Marie Smith) 2008.
*
Many thanks to;
Rosslyn Ramsey, Anthony Pain, Jill Gower, Jude Aquilina, Gaetano Aiello and Phil Heang.
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen's poetry:
The shades of darkness
Jude Aquilina
I have had the pleasure of knowing Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen through my position at the South Australian Writers’ Centre for a number of years. Even before I read his extraordinary poetry, I soon realised, through our conversations, that he was a wise and articulate man. Here is a writer who seeks to understand the passion, and the suffering in the world today and, through his poetry, shares his innate knowledge of the human soul.
Born in Babylon, Iraq in 1953, Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen has pursued a lifetime of writing and learning. He has degrees in Economics and English Literature from the University of Baghdad. He has worked as a journalist and translator, alongside his career as a widely published poet. To date, Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen has published ten collections of poetry, and his poems have been translated into many languages, including English, German and French. He recently attained a Diploma of Interpreting (Arabic-English) from Adelaide Institute of TAFE, South Australia.
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen is known as ‘The Man of Letters’ in his home country. In a literary study on his works, published in 2007 in Lebanon, 33 critics discuss and applauded his poetry. Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen is quickly gaining a reputation as one of Australian’s finest poets, with work represented in high profile Australian literary journals like Meanjin and Southerly, and in anthologies such as The Best Australian Poems, 2007, Edited by Peter Rose, published by Black Inc Press and Culture is, 2008, Edited by Anne-Marie Smith, published by Wakefield Press.
Layered in meaning and nuance, Kamal Ad-Deen’s poetry is rich with deft imagery and well-chosen, often hard-hitting, language. Wide-ranging in his choice of subject matter, the poet pays heartfelt tribute to loss and grief but also to love in its many forms. Unafraid to address issues such as war, human rights and personal relationships, Kamal Ad-Deen does so with skill and empathy. Expect the unexpected! These poems are loaded with the strange and the symbolic. Suffering is shared, and the mysteries and intricacies of Iraqi culture are thoughtfully explored, making the personal universal.
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen’s choice of metaphors and similes is always apt, often pleasingly strange:
‘I was as delighted as a corpse
With its new grave.’
His poems reflect his love of language, both English and Arabic, and are rich with exotic imagery, as in ‘An Attempt at Eulogy’. Here the use of repetition and word play, create a dreamlike picture in the reader’s mind:
‘As good as a lost date
As lean as a Bedouin fire’. . .
‘as lean as a lost date
As good as a Bedouin fire’.
Kamal Ad-Deen’s love of language, of words, and in particular of the letters in the Arabic alphabet is apparent throughout this collection. The letters that make up the holy Koran are explored in depth and steeped in symbolism.
In the tender poem ‘Kelmat’ the poet writes to his ten-year-old daughter:
‘Whenever I want to drink from the glass
The glass of poison
As Socrates did
I remember you
And I throw the glass away.’
The poet’s subtle sense of humour is also well placed, providing balance to the shades of darkness; I quote, ‘like a good fire which dogs make water on’. Often cyclic in form and always satisfyingly whole, these poems know how to dance!
As a fellow poet, I am grateful that Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen chose to make Adelaide his home. His contribution to the South Australian writing community and to Australian poetry publishing is already significant. His dedication to the art is evident in the steady stream of new work he produces and publishes. I look forward to reading more of his writings, both new and translated older works.
I am certain that the exciting poetic voice of Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen will continue to resonate with readers around the world.
*******************
The poems:
- Kelmat
- An Attempt at Hamlet
- Fatherhood
- Sleeplessness
- Boredom
- An Attempt at the Bullet
- An Attempt at Isolation
- Strangers’ Dining Table
- An Attempt at Eulogy
- The Past of Meaning
- An Attempt at Joy
- The Head's Loneliness
- Graves of Meaning
- The crow
- An Attempt at Remembrance
- Fire and Sinbad
- Losses
- The Piper
- An Attempt at Music
- Time Runs, Time Drowns
- The Man
- Small Poems
Kelmat *
1
Whenever I want to drink from the glass
The glass of poison
As Socrates did
I remember you
And I throw the glass away.
2
Whenever I want to travel throughout the Heaven
As Dante did
Or to have my brother and myself lost
As Joseph’s brothers did
Or to enter the fire
As Abraham did
I remember you
And I stop traveling,
Loss,
And fire.
3
All right, then
If you take me back to life.
All right …
But what is the solution
When death, my faithful friend,
Does not stop knocking at my door?
Tell him with the innocence of your heart
Not to come back
Ere we meet
On the peak of letter mountain
Or in exile
Or in legend.
4
All right, then
For me to resume practicing my role
In the drama of the lost humanity.
A drama that continued from Babylon to Baghdad
To Beirut, Berlin and London
Then surely ended in hell.
All right, then
To resume practicing my role
As your father.
But I cannot talk well to you
Since your alphabet is six thousand years old
Nor can I dance well with you
For my white and red blood cells
Have been exhausted by oppression and captivity
Nor can I give you advice
Because you are more mature
Than the queen bee.
5
That is how things are
I bend before you
Like an emaciated lion
Ruined by years, loneliness and earthquake.
I bend before you
And ask you again
Nay, I beg you as an Indian beggar
To let me drink the glass of poison
And I promise you I will never drink it again,
My daughter!
************************
* Kelmat is the name of the poet’s daughter. She is ten years old as the poet writes this poem.
An Attempt at Hamlet
1
Ophelia!
A cloud of innocence,
Accumulate in your body,
Then get lost in water?
Tell me; how was my father murdered?
How did my mother release the snake
At my childhood’s birds?
How did the ghost lead me to the ghost?
And death to the flood?
2
Ophelia!
Your moony body is my age’s elegy.
Thus let me, like an orphan child
Whose feast garment is stolen,
Cry at you.
Let me explore your fresh body
To know the secret of madness and delirium.
Let me explore your forehead
To know the secret of rain.
Let me explore your fingers.
To know the secret of joy
Let me explore your slim belly
To know the secret of childhood and assurance.
3
Ophelia!
Your mythical beauty tortured me every day
Until it led me to the exiles of words.
Your saliva delighted me
As a magician who gets delighted with the thunderbolt.
Thus hug me
Before the last drop of my blood
Will pass away like you.
Hug me,
Before the water eats me.
4
Ophelia extended her hands to me.
But once I kissed her luxuriant fingers,
Then they turned to daggers and insults.
Once I kissed her charming breast
Then the devils and elfs came out
And surrounded me all around.
Once I kissed her lips,
Then the snake appeared to me
And made me drink the poison
In order to die... forever.
Fatherhood
1
The sea is a cruel father
Who deliberately frightens me with a knife.
The sea is false dates
And vague signals of glow and moaning.
The sea is blazing wars
And people deserting homelands
Sleeping naked at night like fish.
The sea is poems
Examining their palms by the fire
To realize the secret of my youth.
The sea is women, taking off the cuffs
Dancing at a mythical down
The song of the drowning boats
And the captain's moan.
They whisper like crystal
I, the enchanted child, rise up
I grope the waist of sand and the mounds of mud.
2
Go down!
The sea is a myth.
The spirit's bunches have fallen
In the middle of the waves.
The love words have fallen and the grass has roved.
The hours have disappeared.
Damn!
You have not brought me the sea pearls
As people have brought.
What a disappointment!
You have come to me with poor man's eyes,
Martyr's homesickness,
A prophet's speech,
And a song saying:
The sea is an everlasting blood bleeding
From a god's wound.
3
The sea is a father,
Tonight,
Will slay me with a knife!
Sleeplessness
Sleep
The flower dropped into the well.
The boys disbanded.
Oh! My eye,
Your eye has become a minaret and ash.
Sleep
Time was almost dawn
And no one housed you: who houses us?
Your palm was empty except for the scent of myrtle
And of a dream extended to fuse the circle of people
Into flowers, Euphrates and date palms.
Running after the years tried us.
A letter like a hot bull tried us:
How could we tame it by our nails?
Our nails were full of the moaning,
Of blood and head.
Sleep
You who dropped the flower into the well
You who dropped the flower into the guards' well.
Now you have become no more than a blind dervish
Weeping in the darkness for God's sun.
Sleep
At this moment there is no one to protect you from
The people's action
The people are asleep…..asleep.
Boredom
1
I got bored with looking at the bears
Eating greedily the giving
Of their great bear,
And with the monkeys
Climbing the trees
Every day
To throw fruit
And fill the air with screaming and yelling.
I got bored with the dogs
Sniffing the corpses,
With the parrots crushing the words,
And with the dove deserting us
Every day
To die in the midst of the letter boat
Searching for Noah and his great flood.
2
I got bored with waiting and non-waiting,
With advantage and disadvantage,
With friendship and enmity,
With the charity bread
And the bread soaked in blood,
With the scent of meaning
And the scent of meaninglessness,
With heaven that never comes
And with hell that stripteases every day
To uncover its violent attractiveness
In the circus of great torture.
3
I got bored with crying and silence,
With tears and with petrified tears,
With those who crossed the isthmus
And sold our clothes.
With those who surrounded us
And stole our letters
In great pleasure.
4
I got bored with mail
And the post box,
With the faithless friends,
And the rough friends,
And the thieving friends
With the letter at its blazing
But finds nobody to see its light.
And the letter dying
But finds nobody to recite upon it
The first sura of the Holy Koran.
5
I got bored with war and peace,
With hunting and hiding,
With poverty and the ghost of poverty,
With hunger and the bear of hunger,
With embers put on the tongue,
With the salt put in the base of the wall,
With female slaves’ legs and effeminate men,
With harlots’ lips,
Spinsters’ breasts
And beggars’ palms
With time that turns into sand,
Straw and ash.
I got bored with you;
Whoever you are
Wherever you are
I got bored with myself;
I am the great bored one.
An Attempt at the Bullet
I had a heart
When I grew up
My heart turned into a sparrow
Then into a flower,
A word,
A tear,
A piece of bread.
When I became older
My heart turned into a steel bullet,
Cold and smooth.
Once I tried to protest against this change
The warplanes saw my heart from a distance
And sent a rocket at me.
It blasted me from inside
So, I fragmentized … fragmentized
Until I saw the sparrow dropping
With one wing,
And I smelt the flower red and red.
With the word, I wrote my tear and bread
And I touched the bullet;
It was as cold and smooth as death.
An Attempt at Isolation
1
After my friends and brothers
Dropped in the sea of hate,
I got into my boat
Traveling up to the lake of my blood.
2
After uncountable disasters,
I reached myself and settled in.
I was as delighted as a corpse
With its new grave.
3
Thus, I have sat in myself
To guard myself.
In order not to forget
What has been done to me,
I have put a spear at my door,
And spotted it with my blood.
I have made out of mud a head like mine.
I have put it on the spear and wept,
Wept until my soul flowed out
Then, I brought my soul back to the head.
4
Every morning I submissively kneel before the head
To say: “Good morning, Head!
You are heavy with sorrow and letters”.
The head replies very calmly:
“Good morning, owner of happy isolation”!
1
Which awaits which?
Does the sun await the street?
Or does the street await the people:
The simpletons and the beggars?
Do the fields await the bees?
Or do the bees await death?
Or does death await darkness?
Which awaits which?
Does disappointment await surprise?
Or does surprise await uselessness?
Does futility await lies?
Or do women await gossip?
Which awaits which?
Does the bridge await the Euphrates?
Or does the Euphrates await the hunched bridge?
Does the poet await the letters?
Or do the letters await the dots?
Which awaits which?
Does the killer await the victim?
Or does the victim await the knife?
Does time await people to put them to death?
Or do people await Time to beg or to become old?
Which awaits which?
Does the magician await the jinns*?
Or does the jinns knock at the door
After being bored with waiting?
2
What a wait!
When the sun cried I charged the street.
When the fields cried I charged the bees.
When fear cried I charged death.
When disappointment cried I charged surprise.
When women cried I charged the gossip.
When the poet cried I charged letters.
When the bridge cried I charged the Euphrates.
What a wait!
What a torture!
When the killer cried I charged the victim.
When Time cried I charged the people.
When the magician cried I charged the jinns.
3
What a wait!
It is said that the jinns and I
Were waiting.
If they knew,
They would not have tolerated this strange torture.
If they knew, they would have flown, flown, flown
If…
O! jinns
Remember me … remember me.
I am together with you in the flask of waiting.
I am together with you in an iron flask.
***********************************
* Jinn is a supernatural fiery creature.
Strangers’ Dining Table
Strangers met at a dining table
My heart's table.
The eldest was turbaned
The second ascetic
The third erotic
The fourth a drunkard
The fifth omniscient
The sixth comic
The seventh a magician.
Instead of a joyful talk
On the affairs of birds, women and the life after death
The whole lot exchanged insults and calling names.
Then one of them proposed firing …
I was about to die!
I was the eighth … the dumb!
An Attempt at Eulogy
1
At forty years old
In the fortieth year
I sat at the door of a dream.
The dream was as lean as a lost date
As good as a Bedouin fire.
The playing cards were showing its picture
With or without a crown
In a formal uniform or with iqal* on head.
I became aware of its silence.
I wept for its pearly tenderness.
2
At the fortieth shout
I said:
Dream, whose picture is shown by the playing cards
On the right and the left
On the left and the right,
How much we have missed your kindness.
How much we have missed your riding
The horses and the evenings
Asking after us
We the undated letters
And the futureless dots
And the meaningless future
And the meaning that leads us ferociously
To the death arena.
3
On the fortieth night
My shout fell down.
So I collected its fragmented glass with my wounded tongue.
The shout was drawn by freedom.
The shout was childish like water.
I said:
You, whose thin picture is shown by time cards
Up and down
Down and up,
How do I deplore your royal forehead?
I who made the tragedy by my blood
And by the flight from the fake lion that ate my liver.
4
In the fortieth treasure
The suns shrank and everything vanished.
The river Tigris was not drawn with ink
Nor with blood
Nor with anything
As if Tigris had never existed.
I wondered at my cowardliness
And at the confusion of my tales.
But your treasure – treasure of history – is more wonderful
And your tale – tale of the depressed – is more complete.
5
At the fortieth stab
I sat near your tree: the fig tree and said
Tree of the one whose picture is shown by trees
Time and again,
I am now near you in the capitals of hunger.
I pray God to make you fruitful
So that I may be satiated
And to supply you with water
So that I may satisfy my thirst
And to invoke you to write
So that I may write my song for the dream
Whose picture is shown by dust
As good as a lost date
As lean as a Bedouin fire.
6
At the fortieth door
The dream had no interest in my shouts and death rattles
Nor in my nudity and loss.
The dream was over there …
Without his queens
Without his butlers and retinue
Without his guards, throne and gold
Without any of those who carry out his orders.
The dream was over there …
Lying dead
Like a letter falling out of a dumb mouth
Like a love date torn by knives
Like a good fire which dogs made water on.
***************************************
*Iqal:
a double-folded felt rope usually worn on the head by Arabs.
1
The letter has left me
And retired in a corner.
It could hardly bear
The mountains of sadness
Borne by the hands of my watch.
It could hardly bear
My crazy loneliness
Nor my childhood that expanded
And turned into an endless sea
Nor my age which was nearly
Fifty disasters old.
The letter has retired in a corner
Placed his head between his hands and cried.
I also cried until my soul flowed.
I returned it to my letter.
My letter cried until its dot flowed.
I returned it to Him ….to God.
2
Thus, I was destined
To see my head borne by spears
Like Al-Hussain’s head
To see my body ulcerate and die
Like Job’s body.
To carry on my back
Prometheus Rock
In order to exchange the madness of the homeland
By the unknown madness
And the Euphrates ash by the ash of the crippled rivers
And the joy of the Tigris by the joy of the cloud
With worn-out under wears.
3
It was a happy day.
During which I fetched a loaf
For my children, exiled far into dream
Without setting fire to Baghdad
Through Haulage wars
Nor killing the disarmed simple people
Through Tamer Lane wars
Nor plundering female slaves
Through Genghis Khan's Wars
Without Kneeling to the Pharaoh of the Age
Without hoisting the Barbarians' flag
Without interfering in the crippled towns' wars.
A hot loaf
I baked it in the dream of the good letter
And in the heavenly dot whose stalk is stable
And whose heart is in the sky.
But the thieves were waiting for me:
Pharaoh's thieves
Haulage's thieves
Tamer Lane's thieves
Genghis Khan’s thieves
The Barbarians’ thieves
And the crippled towns’ thieves.
They robbed me in the broad light
Cut my hand and blinded my eye
And stole my hot loaf.
Tonight, what will I say to my children?
Tonight, what will I say to my heart?
Tonight, what will I say to my letter
And my dot?
The Past of Meaning
1
The past came at the white dawn
Wearing a soiled hat
And a black dress.
The past came to streets that he knows
As a woman knows her hoopoe
And the place in which she submitted her nightingales to death.
2
The past behind the door, is he…?
But who can assure me that I can stay
Easy as the ladder
When a child attends so excited with death and forgetfulness?
3
The past is behind the door
While I am, for ages, wakeful as a broken clock.
But the past dare not enter
And I dare not open the door for guests I do not know.
4
The past sat behind the door.
He ate behind the door,
Slept and woke at dawn.
He thought of nothingness for long.
He married and practiced his blue habit.
5
Behind me is the door, before me is the door
Behind me is the past, before me is the past.
6
Through the hole in the door
I see him getting up from death
Walking to and fro,
To and fro and talking nonsense.
I arrest myself.
7
At a white dawn like a knife
I saw the soiled hat and the black dress.
I remembered I was behind the door for countless ages
As broken clocks I remained wakeful,
Catching the past with my palm
I stab him with the knife.
I choke him happily with death's breeze
Happily as the sunbeam
Happily with my moaning
Happily with the blackness of my blood.
An Attempt at Joy
I reached out my hand to God
To what is permissible by God.
When He looked at me with all his mercy
That wraps everything
He did not place gold in my entreating palm
Nor silver dinars.
He placed nothing but a little letter
It glittered with hope
Like the feast of an orphan child.
When God looked at my thirsty tear
And my smashed heart
He sped up to put a dot
In the middle of the letter.
So my heart became full of gold and silver dinars
Become full of wisdom, joy and love.
Thus, I was a desert and the letter a camel.
Thus, I was a loss and the dot a meaning.
Thus, it was my case until I had a fill.
Thus, I flew together with my camel
I flew like a cloud of light.
The sweethearts who have been smashed by love
And the screams of the body constrained every night
Have laughed.
The sparrows and starlings have laughed
In the middle of light and smoke.
The clocks and hospitals have laughed.
So have the patients, searching for a hope of recovery.
The policeman and the dictator have laughed.
So have the explosive-maker
And the bribed border guards.
The saints, the amazed, the exiled
And the semi-dressed women dancers have laughed.
So have the pupils
The bankers
The taxi drivers
The coolies and the fruit sellers
The thieves, the detectives
The genius and the quasi-genius
So have the effeminate and the passers by.
Those fond of nudeness
And of tables of plentiful wine have laughed.
The murdered and the drowned have laughed
Then the dead altogether have laughed
The laughter has increased
Increased
Increased
I alone was reflecting on the scene and crying.
I alone was reflecting on the scene
And slowly dying.
The Head's Loneliness
1
In my height,
I heard the sound of days,
The days were as widows dressed in black.
In my paleness,
Quarrelling about the spoils of
My boyhood, my youth and my beard’s whiteness.
So, I got confused;
Was copper so cheap to this extent against gold?
2
In my height and paleness,
My eyes were too tired to see
Thus, I started to see through my ears
And perceive through my heart.
It was an absolute loneliness
Loneliness looked just like me,
I was the armless man
Stabbed and confounded by the scene of blood
Dripping heavily as a waterfall.
The scene of blood was frigid and quiet
As a child’s lullaby.
3
In my height and paleness,
I was transported from war to war,
From desert to desert,
From ship to ship,
From confusion to confusion,
From copper to copper.
But gold observed me.
My friends – before my enemies – bowed
In front of the brilliance of gold.
They secretly handed me to Judas
And Judas, before everybody got up
From his restless sleep,
From his bitter greed,
Led me to my exile and hell.
Led me to my long spear.
4
Yah,
My long spear!
All of them bear copper spears
Mine is the longest.
Yah!
How cool my forehead is!
How peaceful my dream is!
How beautiful my birds are!
They follow me from slavery to slavery
From freedom to freedom.
All of them see but they do not understand.
All of them get tortured by the copper spears
That enter their eyes blinded by brilliance.
What cries they had!
What sobs they had!
What disappointments they had!
5
In my height,
In my loneliness, paleness,
And in my great travel,
I heard the sound of everything.
With the eyes, the ears, the heart
I saw everything.
I mocked the brilliance of gold and copper
The brilliance of guards
The brilliance of days
And the brilliance of words.
Graves of Meaning
A female forest is breaking off relations
In an ambiguous music and wearing red colors
Until I have ascertained that water
Partially represented my shape.
I am vanishing and turning into a wolf
Near the glass of the forest
A wolf searching for his she-wolf.
I am the night, the only night,
What is happening?
The forest is playing.
The play here is fierce and as sharp as a knife.
The finger is raising something.
The laughs are tearing off the clouds of the room.
The female refuses, a female near a female,
Nothing but a female.
Time of female, give me a banquet!
Do you play with the forest near me
While I tear into times of desires?
Do not scream, nor stab;
I am thrown into the past of the past.
The forest refuses, becomes angry
And hides its laughs.
The colors flow: the green is embraced by the red,
The blue is crystal,
The yellow uncovers the colors of my torture.
So, at ten years old I become a boy
At twenty years old I became a monster
At seventy years old I turn into a cave.
The forest is playing.
Look! Stare! Nothing but blind staring!
The forest strips something, wears charm, grows and shows.
The forest is ambiguous days breaking at night
As a language invites the sea vehemently.
The female laughs by the sea.
That finger uncovers something recklessly.
An aged man inside me torn by the torrential flow of colors
A man tortured by a female body sleeps for years
And wakes up on a dam of lusts
A child tried by the night and leafed a down of birds.
The forest is a female of light.
The forest is playing. Look! Stare! Spend your lifetime!
Nothing but the wicked staring!
The forest is a comedy.
The aged man passed away.
The female is satiated by her play.
She wore a black dress to cover
The nakedness of fresh body.
The child cried, cried at midnight.
And I, carrying the aged man's coffin
With female's colors and child's cry,
Went away to water graves.
The crow
1
When the crow passed
Over the head of Death, it said:
“I am the crow!”
“So what?” Death said.
“I am the black crow!” the crow said.
So Death laughed and said:
“For me you are whiter than ice!”
2
Yesterday I remembered you
You have no name nor address.
You whom I forgot before
The beginning of the flood.
So I danced without arms and feet.
3
When they removed my naked body to you.
People laughed at the whiteness of my heart
And at the blackness of my corpse.
4
Music of pain is unforgettable
And lies of love are as true as
The kiss of a teenager.
5
Why does time haunt you?
Is it because you have breasts of pomegranate,
A belly of ivory,
Eyes narrow as a southern boat,
And a fate that looks like the crow’s?
6
Music played our fate;
There were not so many colours.
There was black as blood
And there was white as blood too.
7
I return to poetry
As usual
Because of you.
I return to see Time
Beating my letters with his great whip.
I return to see my biggest dot
That looks like a big city
Losing in the sea.
8
Your kisses did not reach.
Maybe because the postman
Was jealous of me.
Maybe because your language
Was white as the crow.
9
Your kisses did not reach
Though your neck was warm.
Yes, you were in your nineteenth summer.
10
You were full of music,
Moony as a summer night,
Obedient as a jewel that lights in the dark,
Silly as a parrot that lisps,
Foolish as a mad man’s laugh.
11
You who taught me to dance:
Dance over the corpses of letters
And over the remains of burnt clocks.
12
You are my crow.
This is what I had to say
At the beginning of the poem
To relieve others and relieve myself.
An Attempt at Remembrance
1
Here I am!
I have come back to your remembrance,
Come back like a beaten army
So, do not try with me your attempt
To count the wounded and missing.
2
Letter, your dot was a winter's fire
And smoke of a happy cigarette.
Your dot was the suns caught in the hand,
An ambiguous summer full of kisses
And a sudden entrance to the happy nothingness.
3
After your parting,
My death began as a mythical festival.
When I asked about its name,
I was boxed on my mouth
Until my blood flowed.
4
Here I am!
I have come back to you
Like an addict who decided
For the thousandth time
To give up drink
And managed so every time!
5
After you was my mirror
That smiled to my smile
And got excited at my coming,
You became my absurdity
That seized me wherever it saw me
Or whenever it remembered one letter
Of my broken letters.
6
I do not conceal this secret from you;
After you left,
I turned into a sharp zero,
An everlasting loss.
I turned into poetry people loved
But I did not.
Because it was a bleeding
Only an intensive bleeding.
7
I do not conceal this secret from you;
After your green night,
The nights became fragments.
After your fresh bed
The beds were no more than deathbeds.
After your room on the top
The rooms rendered into basements.
After your sharp kiss and honey saliva,
The kisses became slain birds.
And after your words as good as childhood,
Words became artificial teeth.
8
After you left, time got lost
And nobody knew where.
I asked everything about everything
But nothing answered me about anything.
I published an advertisement
In all the newspapers,
Asking, where, where and where
So, I was accused of mystery,
Forgetfulness and nowhere.
9
I imagined women to be like you;
Trees of green and fruit of gold,
But my imagination was naked,
And my nakedness was great.
I imagined the towns to be like yours
To be myths of black love, kisses of fire
And stormy meetings like glassfuls of alcohol
But I found them towns of dead people
Who communicated through barking
And offered each other
Nothing but bouquets of insults.
Fire and Sinbad
Fire
******
Whose fire is that surrounding us
As the torches surround a naked witch?
Is it Hell's fire or Magi's fire?
Is it yearning's fire or Al-Bassos fire*?
Love
******
During the travels of my great illusion
I tore up the dot of love.
In it I found the blank space as white as death
Or as black as the sun of a killed feast.
Letter
******
The letter is my heart's orchard and my blood's apple.
The letter is my master,
My blind old man who rolls me
From one mountain to another
From one desert to another
From a drowning boat to another burning
With wonderful beauty.
Family
*******
The drum is my blood.
The sea is my brother.
The travel is my sister.
The fire is my mother.
The letter is my sweetheart.
But who are you
You who keep screaming all the time: "Help! Help!"
Are you my son or my father?
Comment
*********
Miserable is Sinbad
For he fights boredom and death.
As for me, I have to fight boredom,
Death and fire.
Yes, I have to eat fire every morning
And cling to a drowning letter
To reach a land drowning every night
And floating every morning
Like Sinbad who became bored with himself
And with his home address.
******************************
* It is a long pre-Islamic tribal war.
Losses
1
My losses are no longer unbearable.
No sooner do I come out of a loss
Then I fall into another.
I – for example – died,
Died a long time ago
And had enough death.
When I decided to rise from my death,
Dressed green rather than black
Ride the cloud instead of the bicycle,
I was shocked
By the corruption of the cloud
And the tear of its underwear.
2
My losses are no longer unbearable.
I have gone into fire and got burnt well enough.
When I rose up from my ashes
And gathered my ashes
And sprayed in my blood
Lest I might newly die,
I was shocked to know
That those who threw me into fire
Were my friends to whom
I gave the light of the green
And my beloved people to whom
I granted the sun of the cloud.
So, I got puzzled as I had not had
Myself ready for the role of a redeemer.
And I did not imagine that Judas’s role
Would be re-shown everywhere with great success.
3
My losses are no longer unbearable.
When I thought over the names of cities
I found them similar to death.
And when I thought over the names of rains,
Wounds, thunderbolts and women
I grew puzzled
Because my body that rose up
From its death dozens of times
And my heart that resisted
The storm, the blood, and the gold
Wept before me as two orphan children
And complained to me of the lost dream.
They screamed because of the lost dream,
They went down streets like any crazy couple.
So what else could I do but uncover;
My losses are no longer unbearable
No longer … no longer …unbearable.
Thus I will uncover
The rearrangement of the rivers,
Make them run from the south to the north
To reduce my pains.
I will rearrange the clouds
Make them travel by mail
To reduce my childhood’s nakedness.
I will rearrange the tears
make them more mysterious
To satisfy the longing of my gold towers.
So nobody can observe my crying
And nobody can rejoice at my disaster.
The Piper
1
In the middle of a yellow, blue and orange cloud
I sat and looked at the world’s greenness.
As it carried me,
Crossing from a time to a time
And from an age to another.
The cloud stopped.
A beautiful sound of the pipe was heard
Like a spring in the middle of summer.
The cloud stopped.
I had a look down
So that I might see the piper.
I imagined he was my father.
But he was not.
I imagined he was my son.
He was not.
Maybe it was I.
I was not.
He was nobody at all.
It was a beautiful, astonishing sound
Filling everything with pleasure and gold.
2
The cloud got tired.
I looked and found my father
Lying on a cloud ahead of me
And my son riding a cloud following me.
The cloud got tired from stopping.
So, it moved quietly to the end.
But our clouds,
Alas,
Started to lose their delightful colours
And became darker and darker.
An Attempt at Music
1
Music is falling, falling
Like a bird,
A bunch of grapes,
A waterfall.
So my heart flies with the bird
But my hand can not touch it.
The bunch of grapes touches my lips
But there is no love knife
To cut our sharp emptiness.
And the waterfall comes to me
I become water to meet it,
But I collide with its big stone and drown.
2
Even the letters made me worn-out.
They are the only visitors in my biggest loneliness
Who did not hold in their hands:
A sun’s bouquet,
A handful of the moon
Or kisses of feathers.
3
Everybody dressed in the clothes
Of the other
Except me.
When I found nothing to dress in,
I went out naked to the street
Stark naked.
4
Music is falling
With the nice letters ‘L’
Which are as sweet as children’s lips,
With the chirp letters ‘R’
The whispering letters ‘S’
And the dew of the letters ‘N’.
5
Music is coming.
I rise from death
To meet it as two orphan children
Sighing on the festival swing.
6
Since I had acquainted with my blood
I found it surrounded by birds.
Since I had acquainted with my heart
I found it brimmed with alphabets.
7
And sadness is a Bedouin
Making earth as a seat for him
To play on the rebec.
8
My death was admired by me.
But when I tried to repeat it
I went crazy!
9
Music is falling, falling
The soul gets lost
Then vanishes.
10
Music melts as silver does.
Music sleeps like lovers
Tired by long parting
And heavy abandonment.
11
What beauty!
Music plays on
And the letters blaze.
12
The rich man delights with the hotel’s female slaves.
The singer delights with his new sweetheart.
But I, like music,
Seek delight only in myself
Only mix with my letters and dots.
13
How long will I be tortured
By the bleeding of letters;
The protest of the letters ‘H’
The loss of the letters ‘R’
In the memory of the lost cities,
The hypocrisy of the letters ‘S’
The inversion of the letters ‘B’ until death?
My God,
How long will the bleeding of letters torture me?
Time Runs, Time Drowns
1
Time runs, runs
As a thief hunted by a policeman
Drawing his big gun.
Time drowns
As a child breathing his last breaths
In front of us; the poor who have been created
Without hands and feet.
2
Time is an old man
As good as his white beard.
But when I wanted to bid him farewell
I was shocked by his room
Full of the remains of henna
Full of usurers, hangmen, and harlots
Together with their giggles, trifles and heavy breaths.
3
Time is my letters and dots
Surrounding me with clock’s hands.
Time is my hours that search
In vain for two good arms,
Two lips compact with warmth and blossoms.
4
Time is an urn in which delight
Was poured,
Then set at my heart’s shelf.
But the black cats broke the urn.
I did not go out to drive them off
Because my heart died of bleeding,
Died of delight.
5
Time is a woman who stripteases
In front of the dogs with high backs,
Strong and delightful as their lifted tails.
6
Time is a mother who dropped
Her child from the iron bridge
In fear of hunger.
Thus her infant cried on his drowning brother
For full forty years.
7
Time is a myth that we try to draw
And modify by false colors
And stick our naive poems
On its ruined wall.
8
Time is my friends who died without reason
Except that they puzzled a little
In front of the ghost of love
Or the ghost of death.
9
Time is a candle that does not give up
Spreading darkness.
And days that are seized and charged of striptease
In the markets.
10
Time is a lute, a tambourine, and a pipe
Drowning in the warmth of your song.
That hunts me
From one street to another,
From one house to another.
11
Time is unbearable noise
And infinite silly things
And clack that deafens the ears.
12
Time is a bullet.
You must quietly stand before its course
So that it will get your good heart!
1
The moon is at the door
Hung by its feet.
2
Everybody became self-sufficient
As a cut string.
3
Friends beget hither and thither
Lies and trifles.
4
The meaning is imprisoned within itself
None can redeem it
Nor even I.
5
Those who died
Had written well their destroyed poems.
6
Yesterday I died.
In the morning I, as usual, woke up.
7
Hunger is a letter.
All you need is to envelop it
And send to you.
Sorry
To me.
8
The woman died: so did the dream,
The sense and the dawn.
Her death was an occasion for forty other disasters.
9
Madness is beautiful
Because it is my post box full of birds
And my future full of darkness.
10
My letters have protested
Against the grief mountains in themselves.
So I crushed them with a hand of steel
With patience and horror.
11
The poet and the ruler died.
The philosopher died
And the historian died.
When the fruit seller died
The people, then, protested.
12
My only friend who survived
Sent me a letter, full of serpents and owls.
It filled my home with horror.
13
When I read my poems yesterday
In a public celebration
A large mass of audience was there
I had never dreamt of.
Over there, there was none
But my heart,
My table
And my blood.
14
Your love is poetry of light
And you, my sweetheart,are
A she- prophet of darkness.
15
When I wrote your name, I became embarrassed.
I madly loved its letters.
I feared that people would behold them.
Nay, I feared that I would behold them myself.
16
Where are you?
Bring back to my blood Africa’s drums,
Asia’s follies
And the phantoms of the lower world.
17
Your love has become a poem.
All the crazy people of the Earth
Are fond of it.
How wonderful!
18
Your love has led my poetry
To the essence of letters and dots.
It has led me to superiority
To superiority madness.
19
Th…
The moon is at the door.
It has lifted one foot!
1
The poet wrote the title of his poem.
He was tired like a severed head
Alone like a desert falling into the sea
Lonely like a grave waiting for a corpse
Stolen by thieves.
When he attempted to write his poem
The head besieged him
The desert surrounded him
The corpse and the grave mock him
And the thieves captured him very happily.
2
Time is dust.
The day is straw.
The hour is an ash.
When the poet caught
The first letter of dust
The first letter of straw
The first letter of ash
He turned into a letter without dot,
Without joy or fire.
3
I searched for my childhood in an old song.
I searched for it in the date palm of Babylon.
I asked Hilla’s* night about it.
I found it nowhere but in the palm of a child beggar
Sitting near an old bridge
Reaching out his hands to the frowning passers-by.
Now he laughs, then he weeps or sleeps.
4
The poet wrote his elegy
And searched for a listener but he found nobody
Only the Euphrates
Who listened and kissed it
And concealed it within his heart:
In the middle of mud and fish.
5
The woman is in the mirror.
The mirror is in the bathroom.
The bathroom is in the drum.
The drum is in the dinar.
The dinar is in poverty.
Poverty is my friend
Poverty is my lovers,
My people and my sun.
6
The poet wrote the address of his grief
As well as the address of his post box;
Bankrupted to death
And the phone number of his pain.
That he sent to the elegant magazines and newspapers.
The magazines competed to publish these poems
And to full them with joyful colours.
But they forgot to reply
To the address of the bankrupt post box
And to the phone number of his great pain.
*************************************
* Hilla: an Iraqi city near old Babylon.
1
Are the occasions of my loss and exhaustion
So few to justify, my voice, that you also
Become lost and exhausted?
2
You, my voice, were my throat’s nightingale.
Now as you have soared further away
My throat has appeared to my eyewitness
As a cold cage of iron.
3
Nobody can help me in my disaster.
The doctors remained silent.
The medicines became mute.
The prayer trembled between my fingers.
The only thing on the phone line was my tears
Shouting: hello, hello.
4
As the pit of my grave deepens more and more
The poetry I write grows deeper and deeper
What an irony!
5
Friends, Pay attention!
The nightingale flew away
And the crow laughed.
6
When will you come down?
Tell me: when will you come down?
Or am in front of me
Find myself dying member by member?
7
My voice, the bird, come down!
I will not whip you as a slave.
I will not let you thirst to death
Nor shout at you as a mad man.
I will not ask you to sing needlessly nor to protest
Nor to part with the text
When the text gets stupid.
Light down, Bird!
I will not let Sophocles pull out his creatures’ eyes
On the stage of my blood
Nor At-Tawhidi * burn his books every night
In the desert of my dream
Nor Al–Maarri * die alone
As I do
And as you do.
*********************
*At-Tawhidi is a great Arabic philosopher who burns his book at the end of his life.
* Al–Maarri is a famous, blind Arabic poet.
The Man
1
Your name has the light of sun when rising
At dawn through the universes of darkness
Or the coast' brightness
Dawns through the sailors' screams
In the middle of the seas of darkness.
2
In suspect,
I groped torn off limbs
Searching for torn off limbs
Calling your name.
3
The darkness absorbed me
And the sea inside my chest flooded.
I have not yet beaten the sea with my stick
Nor have I drunk from the spring of wisdom.
The sailors inside me screamed: where is the captain?
I wept when I saw the people naked smiling around me.
4
Now erect
Your wall around me.
You, by your name,
The sea bottom shakes,
The stab deeply sinks,
The curse with two canines averts.
Grant me unsuspicious head
Not complaining of the horror of the wild waves.
Grant me two eyes,
A lip and two hands.
Tear out whatever hate or torture I have.
Now erect
Your wall around me.
You, who leaves me in suspect
To live, to die, and to be resurrected
So that to be buried
In the middle of the barking dead.
Small Poems
1
Do not go further
Than the children's table,
Than the lofty joy's table,
Than lofty date-palms,
The duck's singing,
The clay icons and the winds of herbs.
Do not go further than the desert of jealousy,
The blue sleep,
The desert of white lime and the unkempt words.
Do not go further than the body of vision.
2
What is the use of poems
If they do not lead me?
3
“What do I do- the stag said -
If you drink from my pulse?”
The crocodile was silent for a while.
On the stag's cheek
On the river's cheek and flowers'
The crocodile patted smilingly.
Only moments passed
The crocodile devoured the stag.
Only moments passed
The crocodile devoured the river and the flowers.
4
I fear that my black moons will steal me.
I fear that my black moons will leave me
As a dead whale at the coast.
I fear that I fear.
5
Do you remember who named you
Who gave you the frustration and the play?
Do you remember who gave you;
Named you after the play' name?
6
Remind
Once the memory occurs to the mind.
Remind
My memory has gone like the dust of wild storm.
Remind
It has cut the trees of exile
And brought the birds' moaning.
Remind …. Who …?
The memory!
7
My love is papers blown by wind; it is haunted by pleasure.
My love is papers for streets inhabited by strangers
And for streets as lost as estrangement.
My love is papers from black mud.
Papers refuse and migrate, sow or forget.
Papers for the past and desire.
Papers for jealousy and enchantment: white papers!
The kiss is a she-gazelle.
The date is two eyes, a sahara and a gun.
The kiss is a love poem.
The date is a stab in the belly.
The kiss is a butterfly.
The date is golden fish.
The kiss is wonderful tenderness.
The date is a great bed.
The kiss is a feast.
The date is happy children
In the middle of streets
Full of horse-drawn carriages.
The kiss is vagueness.
The date is an attempt to decipher the puzzles.
The kiss is a lie.
The date is a false witness.
The kiss is separation.
The date is a song glorifying separation.
The kiss is a dead smile on a drunkard’s mouth.
The date is a fragmented glass.
The kiss is a legend.
The date is a world legend conference.
The kiss is a waiting.
The date is the poems of waiting
Written in Cuneiform, Sanskrit and Arabic
On the Book of Existence.
The kiss is a blossom.
The date is a garden full of honey.
The kiss is a green beach.
The date is a poet who does not stop smoking hope.
The kiss is a star.
The date is the sky held by a she-lover’s palm.
The kiss is a drowning person.
The date is a bottomless sea.
The kiss is your astounding eyelash.
The date is your smile that guides me
Every night to delicious death
And it does not leave me until the cock crows.
The kiss is the dot of your nuun*
Or the nuun of your lost dot.
The date is an alphabet revealing
The talismans of the world
But they do not know how to bring you back home.
The kiss is friendship.
The date is an engagement until death.
The kiss is a chair.
The date is a bed.
The kiss is a key.
The date is a body.
The kiss is a violin.
The date is a love dance.
The kiss is a tear.
The date is a swift shooting of rain wets
Lovers in the pleasure garden.
The kiss is a cry.
The date is a romantic plot.
The kiss is a green room.
The date is closed curtains.
The kiss is a song.
The date is a singer, a composer and a poet.
They all have cried
Because of the beautiful tune and words.
The kiss is beautiful noise.
The date is secret willow rows.
The kiss is a lost child.
The date is a bride lamenting her bad luck.
The kiss is a daydream.
The date is heresy and hallucination.
The kiss is a poem at its top level.
The date is a collection of love poetry.
Every line in it is your letter
And every letter in it is your name.
The kiss is a window.
The date is a country home
Looking upon the sun and the duck.
The kiss is a pleasure.
The date is a call for writing on it
As a cureless deep death.
The kiss is your dreamy eyes.
The date is your lips; abandoning their
Wonderful miserliness.
The kiss is a love hour.
The date is a wedding night,
The wedding candles
And the bride’s white dress.
The kiss is you.
The date is you ............ of course!
************************************
* Arabic letter.
An Attempt to Fly
1
The stork flew.
The stork of my childhood
Flew farther and farther.
But the meeting with it
Remained as a dream growing inside me
Like a growing fire in the crater of the volcano.
2
Alas! my ambiguous letters.
Alas! my lost women.
Alas! my masks that go on uncovering me.
Alas! my years that follow one another
Meaninglessly or almost meaninglessly.
Alas! my nakedness that surrounded me
Like soldiers surrounded an armless man.
3
In times of black chairs
Dreams to fly lessen every day
Lessen
Lessen
Until they become as small as a sand grain.
4
Who are you?
What makes me write to you my contemporary Iliad?
Uncover your selfishness
So that I can show you my orphanhood.
Uncover your miserliness
So that I can show my date palm.
Uncover your ambiguity and plots
So that I can show you my clearness and naivety.
Uncover your death
So that I can show my doomsday.
5
I am no more than a child
Who fell in the sea, the sea of letters.
So he drowned until the letters wept for it.
I am no more than a monk
Who saw a fresh white violet undressing
So he remained trembling all his life.
I am no more than a feather
From a slain bird.
6
My stork,
When will you come so I can stop weeping?
When will you perch so I can stop my tears from welling up?
When will you perch so I can get happiness
In your warm beak,
And sense my boyhood
Laughing through the whiteness of your wonderful feathers?
7
The stork is still hovering around my heart.
My heart which death, hunger and fire have confiscated.
My heart which the dream to fly has confiscated.
So what will I do
I who have no hands to speak with
Nor legs to fly with
Nor lips to remember with
Nor a memory for practising magic
Nor magic for catching my wonderful stork?
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