The Past of Meaning

 

Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen


 

 

  1

The past came at the white dawn

Wearing a soiled hat

And a black dress.

The past came to streets that it knows

As a woman knows her hoopoe

And the place in which she submitted nightingales to death.


   2

The past behind the door, is it …?

Easy as the ladder

When a child attends so excited with death and oblivion?

 

  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

It ate behind the door, slept and woke

At dawn, it thought of nothingness for long

It married and practiced its blue habit.

 

   5

Behind me is the door, before me is the door.

Behind me is the sense, before me is the sense.

 

    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.

 

( T M )

               

                                      

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