Blame No one

Who else besides you trusts the deluded clouds,

Who else besides you grieves thus without cause,

Who else besides you misplaces his shoes outside the door,

Who else besides you explains the leaves’ coldness untiringly,

Who else besides you urges the globe towards oneself,

Who else has nothing,

Who else is like you, oh carcass.

Thus, you firmly incline like a road, perhaps you will reach your goal

When your rough shoes land onto a lesson unaware of existence

And once you become creative with its despicable stones

Your incline will deviate

Like one protected by his coat from a delayed snow

You descend

This the termination of your suicidal day?

At night sleep escapes you

The nearest water cup is distanced

As if you are the desert,

The phantom’s nooses are exhausted

Surrounded by a field of she-camels and tented passages

Prostrated from excessive thirst

And all the water, drowns in a carafe that repels the table    

At night, all this is yours…at night!

Attired in selfish terror

You search for sleep without yourself.

Alone,

Or alone accompanied by a family that calls you

Around you the engineered neighborhood grows

Contained in a stubborn fence that repeats the howls of the night

A house like all others entertaining the wind

It opens to a marbled threshold that rebukes you

This very day,

You fell,

Gasping unaware of the concealed fog

Reacting to the metallic sounds’ unhidden echo

Suddenly you are thrust backwards, you did not see her

She jumped like a frog touched by death

You turned the piercing key to the shyness of the door

And felt the unconscious pain on the comfort of the tile

It was then your organs rooted in heaven’s space,

It was then you breathed the fill of your bones

And turned on the river of tears…

You were not there.

What affects you,

What protects your cheeks

Whenever you depart like a weary embryo

To an unappealing zealous life.

High above her

She steals her aging features

Bent on the window’s barricade

Competing with moistened wings that comfort your lips

A world filled with innumerable claws

You quash his gifts,

Bemoaning him,

You turn your eyes inward.

Like the jasmine you detail the days’ fragrance

Extracted like unknown clay

Concealing the unknown.

Captured by the gypsies’ work

As they guard escaping temples

As they feverishly dance on the scorching coal

As they tackle the metals that carve the stone.

Amused by receptacles that your distressed soul shears

You misguide bells that do not postpone the mass

To search of you.

Like a stone experiencing the carving wind at the highest summits

You refuse the depression of your body by the clouds

You refuse the partnership of the grave,

For a body chosen by night

Neighbored by countless armor

Teaching that love is tumultuous.

Fragile papers burning in a crushed age

Entrusting to an open head a bleeding past

You tell no one

You did not succeed

You did not die before death

You did not deceive your hands’ sins

You became a wandering flame,

Aggravating the throwing stones

A prophet calling the Goddess

Squandering his own praise

Frightened over there

Rebelling against your subjects here

You endured.

When crying

Water is stolen far from you

Appearing like a lake agonized by the carving of salt

It seeks your refuge

Paper

By paper

It falls off you.

It moans to letters of no sympathy 

By those not knowing the touch of plants,

By those not bound by the characteristics of fire.

Blame no one

Close the heart’s neck

And depart from the chest’s bouquet

That you may bare the warring air

And the warring earth

It will not allow you

It distances itself from you

They are over there in the sweetness of sleep

And you here with nightmarish headaches

They are over there in the forest of justice

And you here blamed for death

They ignore your knowledge of the line

They fear you are an edge that strikes their progress

They can not distance themselves, it will not allow you

Be willful with yourself.

And…

Your fingers compete with the whitener’s banner

With an assaulted blackness in the blindness of talent

You remember

That the ocean has a path similar to the lance

Perhaps

You should forget what you had prepared for them

The flowing blood

In a funeral procession that reaches dreadfully to the womb the size of a grave

But you

While my words tear the glove of patience

You will not forgive me

While you publicly apologize about a lament that cannot support the crime In this text.

Translated by: Mouna Schaheen

from ‘Malath al-Rouh’ (Refuge of the Soul),

Published by Dar al-Konooz al-Adabiyya, Beirut, 1999