Translated by: Mariam Hijjawi

 

Even before the blue light unfurled,

and God pressed the button to replay his creation

I’d awake with the mulberry tree, to write,

to imagine suckling infants,

sucking my inkwell dry.

Giant beings startle under my skin,

and I thank God for the gift of loneliness,

for the stillness of the body,

listening for the cracking

of bones eroded by intermittent sleep.

Thank God for the gift of boredom,

that fingers the walls in search of a new poem.

I told you not to bring children into this world,

for as long as the world awakes before I do,

and opens its mouth to money and blood.

 

Funny about this theorising,

is that inkwell or none,

I’d say the same thing,

or not say the same thing.

It’s just hunger then,

a hunger for speaking,

albeit one that subsides

after the first bite,

as the first is just like the second,

the second, just like the third.

 

I’m a woodpecker then,

pecking where I smell a poem,

the first peck like the second, just like the third,

my beak bleeds,

yet I peck with no qualms.

 

I’m an owl slowly taking bites,

out of the night,

the first bite, like the tenth.

I bite like I’ll tell the birds of the world,

of the great swollen sun in the belly of the sky.

Except it’s my own belly that’s swollen,

with the souls of a thousand goddesses,

and my star is alone in the sky of a lone god.

Oh, my preyed-upon star!

I am your shadow that falls on the trees,

I am your darkness, your well of secrets, your bucket of words.

My swimming star,

I am your boat and your clear water.

Do I clear my head with a line of cocaine,

or with that slit of the doctor’s scalpel,

that slit me in two, to get you out? 

 

You were a creeping insect my son,

a bat hung in the face of the wind,

a prophet crucified, offered-up for life and for death,

a swollen, but extinguished sun.

 

Oh, my earthly moon,

light me up, just for a moment,

I’m a silkworm weaving the silk of despair

inside my hollowed-out heart.

I’m a mole, digging at the earth,

believing it [to be] the sky.

How does the mole dig, Sina?

Like this?

 

Oh, my heavenly moon,

I am all your animals,

but my skin and fur are two colours only.

I am the unspeaking donkey we saw at the zoo today.

I am your far-reaching, unspeaking inkwell.

How do we write the letter “ba”, mama?

“Ba”, batta, baab, balon, baab… batta, balon, baab, bot…

 

Ancient, lazy tigers sleep in the garden,

where poetry’s door is concealed

by a trespassing bougainvillea.

I am the mother who will, in a bit,

go out to water it,

and turn a blind eye to the tigers.

 

Roar, darling!

Haifa’s destitute sky will sing in rhymes,

as you carve her with your canines,

roar!

Not that I’ll hear you…

Just as I don’t hear death,

braying with the thousands of ambulances,

gathering from the roads

those who were killed for money.

I don’t hear the protesters

calling for justice in a fascist state.

I don’t hear the murmurs,

of the corpses in plastic bags as they say:

“You failed me, you let me down”.

I don’t hear my mother’s hand,

reaching out in the darkness, urging me not to leave.

I don’t hear my father’s voice,

muffled now by the hand of the past.

I don’t hear my son’s voice calling me “mama”,

I’d forgotten I’d become a mama.

When did I become a mama my little tiger?

Since when was I a school?

I hate schools and I see,

no heaven under my feet. * 

 

I wish to float.

I wish for a horizontal force

to lift me to the heights,

from which I’ll study the faces

of streets, museums, and death,

that will incite me to write.

 

Which language will you write in, Sina?

This one is written to the left,

towards the heart,

towards defeat.

Writing is an act of compensation for a homeland,

but even this act is submerged in your pliable body,

that is learning to climb to survive life’s horrors.

 

Which language will you dream of the North in?

In a dry, European language?

Or in this jangling one, that dances in the stomach,

even as it laments.

 

Personally,

I’ve lamented my father in two books.

I lamented my mother in tens of books of my imagination,

I lamented two million Gazans as I watched them on a screen,

I lamented myself as I felt the cancer hiding in my breast and womb,

I lamented the city that blew up in the face of time,

and the time, that blew up in our faces.

I lamented the songs that in me once lit

the fire of opposition,

only to eventually become

a joke in weakness’ water.

 

I lamented my beloved blue light,

and my darling mulberry tree,

my companions in awaking and surviving.

I lamented myself when I read

my family name on the shroud of a martyr.

It could be me, mama,

piled-up in a white bag,

missing a hand or a head.

Yet my breast gives sweet milk,

and my soul hangs onto the golden ends of your hair,

before it slips away forever,

like any other day.

 

 

*Reference to a well-known Arabic poem