Adonis

I amuse myself with my country.
I glimpse its future approaching on the eyelashes of an ostrich, I toy with its history and its days, I strike it with stones and thunderbolts. I extinguish its lamps and light its windows, and at the other end of day I inaugurate its history.

I am a stranger to all of you. I am from the other end. I live in a country of my own, inflating the sky to see its ashes, and in sleeping and waking I open a bud to live within.

Something must be born, so I bore caverns in my skin for lightning and build nests. I must pass like thunder into lips as sad as straw, between stone and autumn, between pore and epidermis, between thigh and thigh.
And so I sing: “Form worthy of our demise—advance.”
And so I shout and sing: “Who will give us the maternity of the cosmos, who will nourish us with mines?”

I advance toward my self, toward ruins. The silence of calamity takes me—I’m too short to gird the earth like a rope, I’m not sharp enough to pierce the face of history and plunge in.

You want me to be like you. You boil me in the cauldron of your prayers; you mix me with the broth of armies and the pepper of tyrants, then pitch me like a tent for the wali and hoist my skull like a flag.
(My death,
Nevertheless I run toward you, I rush rush rush to you.)

I inhabit these fugitive words,
I live, my face my face’s lone companion,
And my face is my path,

In your name, my land
That stands tall, enchanted and solitary;
In your name, death, my friend.

Our city fled,
So I sought its paths in haste
And looked around—I saw only horizon,
And I perceived that those who flee tomorrow
And those who return tomorrow
Are a body I tear apart on my page.

I could see: the clouds were a throat,
The water formed walls of flame.

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The leaves sleeping beneath the wind:
A vessel for the wound.
Time perishing: the glory of the wound.
The trees rising among our lashes:
A lake for the wound.

The wound lies in bridges
When the grave lengthens,

The child I was came to me
once,
a strange face
He said nothing We walked
each of us glancing at the other in silence, our steps

Even the wind wants
to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.

I remember madness

The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust
Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space.

No road to this house, a siege,
and his house is graveyard.

from “Elegy for the First Century” Bells on our eyelashes
and the death throes of words,

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The leaves asleep under the wind
are the wounds’ ship,
and the ages collapsed on top of each other
are the wound’s glory,

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We travel upon the Ark, in mud and rain,
Our oars promises from God.
We live—and the rest of Humanity dies.
We travel upon the waves, fastening
Our lives to the ropes of corpses filling the skies.
But between Heaven and us is an opening,
A porthole for a supplication.