CALL TO POETS Original poetry wi

CALL TO POETS
Original poetry with strong imagery; poems of cultural flux and interactions; personal translation of favorite works from the world's verse---these can be submitted at alyguy@hotmail.com. As can commentary on poem eating. So folks, send it on in.

VACANA POETRY THREE ARAB POETS ELISAVIETTA RICHIE RAY FREED TIA BALLENTINE

THREE ARAB POETS
The poems following are from a 1984 bilingual anthology of Arabic poetry, Victims of a Map, translated by Abdullah al-Udhari and published in London by Al Saqi Books.

Alan Young

We Are Entitled to Love Autumn

We are entitled to love the end of this autumn and ask:
Is there room for another autumn in the field to rest our bodies like
coal?
An autumn lowers its leaves like gold. I wish we were fig leaves
I wish we were an abandoned plant
To witness the change of the seasons. I wish we didn’t say goodbye
to the south of the eye so as to ask what
Our fathers had asked when they flew on the tip of the spear. Poetry
and God’s name will be merciful to us.
We are entitled to dry the nights of lovely women, and talk
about what
Shortens the night for two strangers waiting for the north to reach the
compass.
An autumn. Indeed we are entitled to smell the scent of this autumn.
And a people be born on the guillotine?
We are entitled to die the way we want to die. Let the land hide in an
ear of wheat.

--Mahmud Darwish

A Gypsy Melody

A clear street
A girl
Goes out to light the moon,
And the country is far away,
A country without a trace.
A sour dream
A voice
Chisels a waist in a stone.
Go, my love,
On my eyelashes or the guitar strings.
A predatory moon
The silence
Breaks the wind and the rain,
Turns the river into needle
In a hand weaving trees.
A floating wall
A house
Disappears after it has been seen
Maybe they will kill us
Or lose their way in the alleyway.
A scandalous age
A death
Desires us while passing through.
Everything is finished now.
We’re getting closer to the river
The gypsy’s journey has come to an end.
We are tired of traveling.
A clear street
A girl
Goes out to stick pictures
On my body’s wall,
And my tents are far away,
Tents without a trace.

--Mahmud Darwish

Mahmud Darwish was born 13 March 1941 in the village, al-Barweh in Palestine. He died on 9 August 2008 undergoing open heart surgery in Dallas. His burial will be in Ramallah. He wrote in Arabic, but spoke English, French and Hebrew. His work has won many awards and been published in 20 languages. The Palestinian-American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye has said "Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging...."

How I Became An Article

They killed me once
Then wore my face many times
The Clock on the Wall
My city collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
Our neighbourhood collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The street collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The square collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The house collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The wall collapsed
The clock
Ticked on

--Samih Al-Qasim

Samih Al-Qasim from a Palestinian Druze family was born in 1939 in Zarqa, Jordan. A prolific and politically active writer he has been imprisoned often but remains resident in Israel.

The Wound

I
The leaves sleeping under the winds
Are boats for the wound.
The buried past is the glory of the wound.
The trees growing in your eyelashes
Are lakes for the wound.
The wound is in the crosspoint
When the grave reaches
When patience reaches
The tips of our love, our death.
The sound is a sign
The wound is in the crossing.

II
I give the voice of the wound
To a speech with choked bells.
I light the fire of the wound.
For a stone coming from far away,
For a dried up world, for drought,
For time carried on a stretcher of ice.
When history burns in my clothes
And blue nails grow in my book,
When I shout at daylight
“Who are you, who’s thrown you on my books,
On my virgin land?”
I see in my books, in my virgin land
Eyes of dust.
I hear someone saying:
“I am the flourishing wound
Of your small history.”

III
I have called you a cloud
Wound, turtle-dove of departure.
I have called you a feather and a book.
And here I am starting conversation
With a noble word
In the shifting of islands,
In the archipelago of the noble fall.
And here I am teaching conversation
To the wind and palm trees,
Wound, turtle-dove of departure.

IV
IfI had havens in a country of mirrors and dreams,
If I had a ship,
If I had the remains of a city,
Or a city
In a country of children and weeping
I’d have made out of all this for the wound
A song like a spear
Piercing trees, stones and heaven
And soft as water,
Overpowering and amazing like a conquest.

V
Rain on our deserts,
World charged with a dream and longing
Rain and shake us, we the palm trees of the wound,
And snap two branches for us
From the trees that love the silence of the wound,
From the trees that stay awake over the wound
With arched eyelashes and hands.
World charged with a dream and longing
World falling on my forehead
And drawn like a wound
Don’t come closer, the wound is nearer than you,
Don’t tempt me, the wound is more beautiful than you.
The wound is beyond the fate
Your eyes cast
On the lost civilizations
It’s left no sails
Nor islands.

--Adonis

VACANA POETRY THREE ARAB POETS ELISAVIETTA RICHIE RAY FREED TIA BALLENTINE