I Am Syrian

I am a Syrian. Exiled,
in and out of my homeland,
and
on knife blades with swollen feet I walk.
I am a Syrian: Shiite, Druze, Kurd,
Christian, and I am Alawite, Sunni, and Circassian.

Syria is my land.
Syria is my identity. My sect is the scent of my homeland,
the soil after the rain,
and my Syria is my only religion.
I am a son of this land, like the olives
apples pomegranates chicory cacti mint grapes figs ...
So what use are your thrones,
your Arabism,
your poems,
and your elegies?
Will your words bring back my home
and those who were killed accidentally?
Will they erase tears shed on this soil?

 
I am a son of that green paradise,
my hometown,
but today,
I am dying from hunger and thirst.
Barren tents in Lebanon and Amman are now my refuge,
but no land except my homeland
will nourish me with its grains,
nor will all the cloudsin this universe quench my thirst.

---Youssef Abu Yihea, Translated by Ghada Alatrash

रोशनी क़ंदील से ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है

रोशनी क़ंदील से ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है
कविता नोटबुक से ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है
और चुंबन होंठों से अधिक सार्थक
मेरे तुमको लिखे ख़त
हम दोनों से अधिक महान और महत्वपूर्ण हैं
वही अकेले दस्तावेज़ हैं जहाँ
लोग खोज निकालेंगे
तुम्हारा हुस्न
और मेरी दीवानगी

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by पूजा प्रियंवदा

The Swallow

Oh, Swallow
As you depart our spring
slow down.
In the wood burner's exhaust pipe
as the firewood came inside,
you forgot your echo.

Oh, Swallow,
slow down.
With the feather in the
window, Swallow,

we adorned
the martyr's picture

and death flew out of the picture.

Slow down, Swallow.
The nest belongs
to whoever builds it.

---Hala Mohammad

There is a relationship between war and words

There is a relationship between war and words.
There is a relationship between love and words.
I choose my battle in words.
I make fire by words.
I save some people in words; make victims in words
This is my playground. I fight by words
The violence inside me will come out in words
So that there is no blood.

---Yehia Jaber

A Pebble

The day after the flood
A stagnant morning
There is a tear at the bottom of the world
Frozen like an orphan pebble

The hurricane obliterates everything
Palmtrees, houses, boats, bicycles and minarets
But this pebble stays

right there, shining faintly
Because the hand of eternity
Has polished its bald head just like the Lord’s shoeshine:

There it is under your foot. Step on it if you wish. Step hard

Then cross over. Fear not
Among pebbles, it is no more than
a pebble.

--- Sargon Boulus. Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon. From Sargon Boulus, `Azma Ukhra li-Kalb al-Qabila (Beirut/Baghdad: Dar al-Jamal, 2008)]

Shahrayaristry

I stand accused of Shahrayaristry
By friends
By enemies,
Accused of Shahrayaristry,
Of collecting women
Like stamps or empty matchbooks,
Of pinning them up
On the walls of my room.
They call me narcissistic,
Oedipal, sadistic...
Accusing me of every known disorder
To prove themselves educated
And me a deviant.

Nobody will hear my testimony,
My love.
The judges are biased
The witnesses bribed.
I am declared guilty
Before I testify.
Nobody, my love,
Understands my childhood
For I am from a city
That has no love for children,
That knows no innocence,
That has never bought one rose
Or book of poetry,
A city of rough hands,
Of hard feelings and hearts
Calcified by swallowed glass and nails.
I come from a city of ice walls
Whose children are dead of frostbite.

I make no apologies, have no intentions
To hire a lawyer
Or save my head from rope.
A thousand times they hung me
Till my neck got used to hanging,
And my body to the ambulance.

I make no apologies, have no hopes
For an innocent verdict
From any man,
But in a public hearing
I will tell you alone
Before my mere accusers,
Who tried me for possessing more than one woman
For hoarding perfumes, rings, combs
And other rationed things in wartime:
I love you alone,
I cling to you
As the peel to the pomegranate,
The tear to the eye
And the knife to the wound.

I want to say
If just this once
That I have never followed Shahrayar,
I am no murderer
And have never melted women in acid,
But am a poet,
Writing out loud,
Loving out loud.

I am a green-eyed child
Hanged on the gates of a childless city.

--- By Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

*Shahrayar=The King

My body is not your battle ground

My Body is not your battleground

My breasts are neither wells nor mountians,
neither Badr nor Uhud

My breasts do not want to lead revolutions
nor to become prisoners of war
My breasts seek amnesty: release them
so I can glory in their milktipped fullness,
so I can offer them to my sweet love
without your flags and banners on them

My body is not your battleground
My hair is neither sacred nor cheap,
neither the cause of your disarray
nor the path to your liberation
My hair will not bring progress and clean water
if it flies unbraided in the breeze
It will not save us from our attackers
if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun
Untangle your hands from my hair
so I can comb and delight in it,
so I can honor and annoint it,
so I can spill it over the chest of my sweet love

My body is not your battleground
My private garden is not your tillage
My thighs are not highway lanes to your Golden City
My belly is not the store of your bushels of wheat
My womb is not the cradle of your soldiers,
not the ship of your journey to the homeland
Leave me to discover the lakes
that glisten in my green forests
and to understand the power of their waters
Leave me to fill or not fill my chalice
with the wine or honey of my sweet love

Is it your skin that will tear when the head of the new world emerges?

My body is not your battleground
How dare you put your hand
where I have not given permission
Has God, then, given you permission
to put your hand there?

My body is not your battle ground
Withdraw from the eastern fronts and the western
Withdraw these armaments and this siege
so that I may prepare the earth
for the new age of lilac and clover,
so that I may celebrate this spring
the pageant of beauty with my sweet love.

- Mohja Kahf, 1998

Your Love

My dear with the deep eyes, Your love
is extreme,
mystical
sacred.
Like birth and death, your love
is unrepeatable.

---Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

I'm No Teacher

I am no teacher
To teach you how to love,
For the fish need no teacher
To teach them to swim
And birds need no teacher
To teach them flight.
Swim on your own.
Fly on your own.
Love comes with no textbooks
And the greatest lovers in history were illiterate.

---Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Refinement by Reading your Body

The day the conversation ended
Between your breasts awash in water
And the tribes that battled over water,
That day ended our Golden Age
And began the Age of Decay.
The rainclouds went on strike and said no rain
For the next five hundred years
The spring birds went on strike and stopped all flying
And the ears of grain abstained from procreation
And the fertile crescent moon took on the shape
Of a bottle full of crude oil.

The day they exiled me from the tribe
For leaving a poem and a rose
At the doorflap of your tent,
That day ended our Golden Age
And began the Age of Decay
An age that knew its grammar and syntax
But not a thing of womanhood,
The generations of degeneration
And the erasure of all women's names
From the memory of the nation.

Oh darling
What kind of nation is this,
Policing love like a dirty cop,
Considering the rose
A conspiracy against the regime,
Considering the poem
A manifesto of the underground?
What kind of nation is this
In the form of a yellow locust
Crawling out on its gut from the ocean to the Gulf
From the Gulf to the ocean,
Talking like a holy man all day
And woozy over a woman's navel all night?

What kind of nation is this?
Deleting love's material from curricula.
Deleting poetry,
And women's eyes.
What kind of nation is this?
Going to war with every raincloud,
Opening a classified file for every breast
And filing a police report for every rose.

Oh darling
What are we to do in this nation?
This nation that dare not see its body in the mirror
For fear of craving it?
That dare not hear a woman's voice on the phone
For fear of being too impure to pray?
What are we to do in this nation
That knows all there is to know
Of the October revolution,
Of the Zanj slaves who rose against their Caliph master
Of the Karmathians who stood against the Caliph's armies
And still keeps talking down to women like some Sheikh?
What are we to do in this nation
Between the works of Imam Ash-Shafi'i... and the works of Lenin
Between Qur'anic exegeses.... and Playboy magazines
Between Mu'tazilism... and the music of The Beatles?

O darling dumbfounder, you
Who amaze me like a child's toy,
I feel civilized
For loving you.
I call my poems historical
Because they have been your contemporaries.
All time before your eyes had yet to be,
All time after them went to pieces.
Do not ask me why I'm with you.
I just want an escape from being backwater,
To re-enter the time of water,
I want to defect from the Republic of Thirst,
To leave my backward desert life,
To sit beneath the trees
And bathe in springwater
And learn the names of the flowers.

I want you to teach me to read and write
For writing on your body is the ABC
Of entry into civilization.
Your body is not counterculture.
No, it is culture incarnate.
Whoever does not read the notebooks of your body
Will spend his life illiterate.

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Why

Why do you ask me to write to you?
Why do you ask me
To go naked before you
Like a paleolithic?
Writing is the one thing that leaves me naked.
When I speak
I keep somewhat clad.
When I write
I roam light,
Free as a legendary bird.
When I write
I divorce myself from history
And from earth's gravity
To orbit in the outer space of your eyes.

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman