Translated by: Adam Zuabi

 

​

Before the blue light unfurled,

and God pressed the button to replay his creation

I would awake with the mulberry tree, to write,

to imagine suckling children,

sucking my inkpot 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

 

What is funny about this theorising,

is that with or without an inkpot,

I would 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 sense the scent of a poem

the first peck like the second, just like the third

my beak bleeding

As I was pecking with no mercy

 

I’m an owl slowly taking bites,

out of the night,

My first bite is just like the tenth

I bite as if to inform the birds of the universe

of the great sun that is inflated in the midst of the sky

but it is I who is inflated in my midst by

the soul of a thousand goddesses

and mine is a single star in the sky of a single god

 

Oh my far-flung star

I am your shadow that has fallen from the trees

I am your darkness, the well of you secretes, the bucket of your language

 

My floating star

I am your boat and pure water

will I clear my mind with a line of cocaine

or with the line of the doctor’s scalpel that

has parted me in two so you could come out

 

You were a crawling bug my child

You were a hanging bat facing the wind

A crucified prophet destined for life and for death

 

Oh my earthly moon

Light me for just an instant

I am a silkworm weaving my despair

In my hollowed heart

I am a mole digging the ground

thinking it a sky

How does a mole dig, Sina?

 

Oh my ethereal moon

I am all of your animals

But my skin has only two colours

I am the bashful zebra that we saw today at the zoo

I am your vast silent inkpot

How do we spell B my darling?

B for boat, bear, balloon...bear, boat, balloon

 

Ancient lazy tigers are sleeping in the garden

The door of poetry is hidden by an intrusive bougainvillea

I am the mother that will come out soon to water it

and turn a blind eye to the tigers

 

Roar my loved ones,

The poor skies of Haifa will sing with rhymes 

As you carve them with your teeth

Roar

And I shall not hear you

Just as I do not hear death braying from thousands of Ambulances

collecting from the streets those killed for money

I do not hear the sounds of the demonstrators

asking for justice in a fascist state

I do not hear the voices of the charred bodies in nylon bags

saying: you have failed me, you have failed me

I do not hear the sound of my mother’s hand extending

In the dark, pleading for me not to leave

I do not hear the sound of my father

silenced by the hand of the past

I do not hear the sound of my son when he calls out mommy,

when I forgot I become a mommy

When have I become a mommy my little tigers?

When have I become a school? I do hate schools.

And I cannot see any heaven beneath my feet.*

 

I wish to float

and be carried by a horizontal gravity to the far ends,

probing the faces and streets and museums and death

which will incite me to write

 

In which language will you write Sina?

This language is written to the left

Towards the heart

Towards loss

Writing is an act of compensation for a homeland

But even this act is submerged in your flexible body

Which is training itself to climb to be safe from life’s enormities

 

In which language will you dream in the northern

Hemisphere of earth?

In a dry European language

or in this ringing language that dances in the belly

even when it is mourning?

 

Personally I mourned my father in two books

In my imagination, I mourned my mother in tens of books

I mourned two million Gazans watching them on the screen

I mourned myself while I feared

the hidden cancer in my breast and womb

I have mourned the city that blew up in the face of time,

and the time, that blew up in our faces

I mourned the songs that once in me lit

the fire of refusal,

only to become, in time,

a joke in the water of frailty

 

I mourned my beloved blue light,

and my beloved mulberry tree,

my companions in awaking and surviving

I mourned 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 flows with sweet milk,

and my soul clings to the golden ends of your hair,

before it slips away forever,

like any ordinary day.

 

*Reference to a well-known Arabic poem