A Traveling Cafe
In your land, even the pebbles bloom
In its springs.
And the birds beckon with their lightness.
The dew said: “For photography – The old house wall.”
I see summer lying in silence
In a bed of sand and water on the sea,
The teacher forgets his chalk cloud In the pot.
A mirage of a blackboard.
And the deserts of countries
Wounded by wandering and grass.
The absence of absence.
The story was woven with a silk thread.
And the majesty of a woman in winter.
I see lightning in a stone
Stained by the footsteps of the shadow
And the sand is the rose of women
Who crossed in a hurry.
And they lit men. Heavy.
I picked up shadows.
I stood on a shore.
And a little sunset,
Like a grain of sand on the slope of a table.
Raw fish in the confusion of the nets.
The horizon is closed
And the echo is narrow
And the city has no dawn except the sea.
And bread is the family of the poor.
No passers-by except a few.
From daggers folded in the waists
And the shadow in the sun kills.
Grass for sale.
The ascent of a team On lottery paper
Strengthened by the darkness of his henna.
A country on the palm of its executioner
Bends every day? On the gold of the wall newspapers.
The last letter walks without another.
Darkness feeds bread and light
From a woman’s pistachio In the daylight of the windows.
Behind the veil of her curtains.
In a celebration – the sick air – Which the sea has not yet tamed.
A wound as painful as mountain birds.
And an old shadow sleeping on a tree in the clouds.
And nothing in the wind.
Only the blood of the wind.
An absence that wandered in the “metaphysics” of its shadow:
The breaking of the prosody here is for necessity,
A rose on the clay drinks a shadow.
On cold porcelain. Like sugar water. And a hookah flower.
In the dust, the wind stumbled with the steps.
Air that melts a stream fit for morning on a lip,
And water that dwells on the clay of its trees.
A moon that drinks the night and the wait,
Waving between his notebooks
The thirst of water for water
When it melts in a woman’s sugar
Her summer
Like a plant part.
Translated by/ Hatem Al-Shamea.
A New Home – Nabila Al-Sheikh – trans. Hatem Al-Shamea
