Things asleep
Look at me mother,
I’m back with more meat
and bones and wisdom.
These days I can think of death,
and sleep without being lulled,
my milk teeth now grind my losses.
I came back to find
tongues of lullabies severed,
children bellowing in every corner
and the Muezzin’s call stifled
by a strange hand
Return is a cinema screen
and I no longer recognise the lead.
She comes in once,
yet tampers with the scenario
a thousand times.
Return is a cat who ate its young.
Return is my plait,
that I cut off
and fed to time.
The once green garden is now a woman
afraid of old age,
the well, a bed in a hospital,
and cats are the souls of women who once
cried on my arm.
And I am now your mother.
I shield your body with mine,
from the bullet that your seventy years
will suddenly release.
The accent I once rode,
now rests under the earth.
What happened to the shifting “Qaf”
and the “Kaf” that barely came out?
Where is the sling and the bird?
Where is the neighbours’ boy?
What was his name?
..and what was mine?
I wouldn’t have forgotten it
had it had
only one name;
it would have fallen
right on my head
like a sniper’s shot.
Where are the skins I cured with life’s salt?
Where are the war supplies
that never came?
They were eaten by waiting and mites.
Where is that Northern gate that opens out
onto happiness?
Where is my uncle Mahmoud,
who used to eat grass and ask God
to forgive humanity’s sin?
My old father, who became my son, is dead.
But where is the young man
who used to be my father?
Where is that body I used to climb
and pick from its forehead
the sour fruits of time?
Tell him that all the political lessons
have rotted in my head
and that I’ve replaced them
with poems I do not understand,
that I wanted to fix but spoiled instead.
My mother put
a finger to her mouth
signaling me to shut up
and pointed a finger
at the piles
of things asleep.
I am but one word
Look father,
language is a lavish bed
and I slipped out of life’s vagina
onto an old step.
So in which language do I lament your death?
For twelve whole years
Al-Khansa’* stood at the school gate.
I gibbered after her,
like a parrot with no tongue
and every time tears welled up in her eyes,
creatures with hardened skins
would walk across the desert of my eyes.
My mother cuts the mulberry tree
everytime it grows,
so its roots don’t split the wall.
Which language can split
my sadness over you?
I picked the words
off the tree’s memory
of its long-gone limbs,
I plowed language
from the meadow’s fantasy
of its absent expanse.
Cats taught me their elegies
over the fetuses
that never formed in their wombs,
death tied me to the school gate,
asking for its share;
I am but one word
hopping on its short tongue
I am but a word I can’t make out
I will be spoken and be finished
If lamentation was meowing
or bleating
I would become it.
I would be a long wail
that summons my father
or a question that leads me
to him
I am but a name that stayed in God’s belly,
one that he forgot to teach Adam.
Let me know of other names
so I can say another.
Look father,
language is a lavish bed,
Al-Khansa’ sleeps on it like a ripe sphere.
When I stand at its foot,
Like an abandoned quarter,
silence whistles through me.
And into my body,
on the tips of their toes,
come the elegies[1].
A bed of green onions
Come look, my cat,
at my dull ember.
Each time I turn my back,
It’s covered with ash by time’s big hands
And I am like you in this darkness;
my pupils dilated,
my meowing stifled
in the chest of an old doll
Pupils crossed by ancient travelers
who never even heard
of the idea of arrival
Pupils of railways and cities
and whistles and leaving,
expansive as a meadow that lost
his father, the horizon
and so went on forever.
I rode on the back of his untamed wind,
I spun my life into detective stories,
I dwelled forty bodies and left fifty,
I married twice,
I almost died
a thousand times in my dreams
If it weren’t for the scarecrow of loneliness
who punctured the silence of the night
I tattooed a Canaanite tablet on my back
and took to persuading people
that I was four thousand years old.
I built houses on hills that I did not know.
I lived in them,
then razed them to the ground,
then built others
I discarded men, and attracted others
I thought I had been killed
but my breath kept running
back to my chest
I politely threw love out,
and so he came back
through the window
I slaughtered the children that I thought up,
to escape the prisons of motherhood.
And motherhood watched from afar, delighted
I hid my father’s rifle
hoping that gazelles would one day rule us
but they were then skinned in our kitchen
Then God’s chosen people
began to choose
our heads one after the other,
dragging us to the big slaughterhouse
that we call freedom
My skin is mottled with joy and regret.
Each time I replace it
with a smooth dress
it is torn by sarcasm’s nails
and I am left naked
I have met poets
with whom I thought
that doomsday was upon us.
And that God had chosen us,
only us, to live
I have left men,
making them think
that they were bastards
and that they did not deserve love
except to lament their luck at its gate
And here I am
After all this, my mottled cat,
meowing mutely at the gate
of our little house.
The beautiful past lets me in,
I walk in the backyard
looking for the tail
of a fish I ate thirty years ago
The pomegranate tree is dead
but its shadow lives on,
my pupils dilate in its blackness
I crawl atop the wall
overlooking a bed of green onions
My mother’s hand weeds it
My father’s is buried within it
[1] One of the most influential poets of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. In her time, the role of a female poet was to write elegies for the dead.
