IMAN MERSAL ~

 

CV

A ruthless catalog of sorrows:

years in front of the screen, diplomas before jobs,

and languages —all the torture—now ranged under Languages.

Where are all the wasted days?  And the nights

of walking with hands stretched out

and the visions that crept over the walls?

Where are the feelings of guilt

and the sudden sadness faced with a little hill of fruit

atop a handcart in some forgotten street?

Years with no mention of the empty hours or the funerals,

expunged of black depressions and nibbed nails,

the house keys forgotten inside the house.

There isn't a single open window

and no trace of the desire, deferred, to leap out.

A life overstuffed with accomplishments,

scrubbed free of dirt:

proof that the one who lived it

has cut all ties to the earth.

___________________

Iman Mersal

The Threshold

translated by Robyn Creswell

Farrar, 2022

MAHMOUD DARWISH ~

A Music Sentence

A poet now, instead of me,

writes a poem

on the willow of distant wind.

So why does a rose in the wall

wear new petals?

A boy now, instead of us,

sets a dove flying

high toward the cloud ceiling.

So why does the forest shed all

this snow around a smile?

A bird now, instead of us,

carries a letter

from the land of the gazelle to the blue.

So why does the hunter enter the scene

and fling his arrow?

A man now, instead of us,

washes the moon

and walks over the river's crystal.

So why does color fall on the earth

and we are naked like trees?

A lover now, instead of me,

sweeps his love

into the mire of bottomless springs.

So why does the cypress stand here

like a watchman at the garden gate?

A horseman now, instead of me,

stops his horse

and dozes under the shadow of a holm oak.

So why do the dead flock

to us out of wall and closet?

______________

Mahmoud Darwish

If I Were Another

Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009

translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

ADONIS ~

"Ali Ahmed Said was born in a small village in Syria in 1930. His choice
of pen name — Adonis — is an indicator of the audacity of both his poetry
and his writings on Arab culture and society. In 1961, this self-proclaimed
Arab Nietzsche published Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, a complex two-
hundred-page collection that many consider turning point in modern
Arabic poetry. Its impact on Arabic poetics has been no less substantial than 
the impact T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" had on English poetics."

— Kareem James Abu-Zeid

R E A D      M E

Yale

2017