1.
Awaken, O boughs of passion,
saddle the winds with your exhausted words.
Awaken, like roots craving the taste of salt,
like an echo wandering on a rainy night.
Who is there awaiting the bitter drug
of the streets? The dangerous embers of life….
Stare and you will see in me a mirage that sleeps
and awakens with the desert’s sun.
My limbs are exhausted from the cold sun
panting after the dead stone.
O, frigid stone, my limbs
pierce me, they are enflamed
by a bewildering chill like the strong arms
of a future nation.
My limbs are openly gouged by death.
They resist, like the panting palm trees in this land,
this saline land.
They resist and I beseech this panic
to leave….
(The roads are a lighthouse,
the climate of alleys in bygone cities,
mazes for those who can’t see the dreams of the poor on these walls.)
2.
Awaken, for a sweet numbness gathers in my limbs and sharpen me
like a spear plunging in the heart’s folds, exploding arteries
of words. Awaken, my voice is not capable of whispering,
It weeps blood,
the perfume of the seventies,
its comrades haunted by stabs
of doubt. I read only the soil
of the past, my blood is taken from me.
It awakens before birth….abandons me.
I search in a sinful time for blood that haunts me,
for a diaspora that knows the taste of estrangement.
My homeland flees from me.
Who among you has not felt
the ache of blood? Has not questioned
the secret of the flow that secures the heart
on its throne?
I awoke to ask:
who among you?
3.
Converse with me, smug time!
Shackles have baptized my limbs with murderous rust,
with doubt, and they have alienated me
in my homeland.
Awaken, O handful of wind known as home.
Bind up your grief.
The bullet kills
if I do not expel your thirst
….the bullet kills
if I do not retain your blood within me.
….The bullet is coming
if not….
Like the sea, awaken
in waves, or a woman.
In my voice the path of your wound now burns,
My eyes are mirrors of fear, in them
your passion will grow, so awaken.
4.
Muhammad wandered
these roads begging for tears,
pregnant with insanity/death.
You were
a child, a rose….
A book holding the sea between its palms,
a whiteness delirious with flood, a confession
of gulls, steps gathering rocks, a homeland
on edge, its heart leaping with pride.
He ended up at the guillotine.
5.
In my voice you spring like water.
You were the beginning: a night
and you are my lighthouse in all
weather. I passed through childhood.
This is my youth wrapped in timidity,
How can I begin
when panic calls?
6.
O, boughs of lust panting in my palm, awaken
on a homeland, or a horizon….
You will find my eyes enchanted. I am shaking
with fear and love….
Awaken.
Translated by Joseph T. Zeidan
‘Istifaqat’ (Awakenings) 1982
Arabic Female Poets, ed. Nathalie Handal