A Wandering Café
by Mohyee Addin Jarma
translated by Hatem Al-Shamea
A Wandering Café
In your land, even the pebbles bloom,
Springs welling from their core.
Birds beckon with their gentle swoop,
Dew whispers: “Photograph – the old home’s wall.”
I see summer like silence, laid to rest
On a bed of sand and water by the sea,
The teacher forgets his chalk clouds in the bowl,
A mirage for a blackboard.
And deserts of lands
Wounded by wandering and grass,
The absence of absence.
The tale is woven with a silken thread,
And a woman’s splendor in winter’s guise.
I see lightning in a stone,
Marred by the footsteps of shadow and sand,
And the rose of women who passed in haste,
Leaving men laden, heavy.
I gathered shadows,
Stood on a shore,
And a sunset, slight as a grain of sand,
On the slope of a table.
Raw fish in the tangled nets,
The expanse is closed,
The echo narrow,
The city with no dawn but the sea.
And bread, the sustenance of the poor,
No passersby but a handful,
With daggers tucked in their waists,
And the shadow in the sun, killing.
Grass for sale,
A team ascends
On lottery paper,
Cardboard steeped in the darkness of henna.
A land on its executioner’s palm,
Bending daily,
On the gold of the wall newspapers.
The last letter walks without an end,
Darkness feeds bread and light
From a woman’s pistachio in the day of windows,
Behind the veil of her curtains.
In a celebration – the sick air,
Not yet refined by the sea,
A wounding sorrow like mountain birds,
And an old shadow sleeping on a tree in the clouds.
And nothing in the wind
But the wind’s blood.
An absence wandering in the “metaphysics” of its shadow:
-The breaking of meters here is for necessity-
A rose on the mud drinking shadow,
On cold porcelain,
Like sugar water,
And a hookah flower,
In the earth where the wind stumbled with steps.
Air melting into a morning-worthy stream on a lip,
And water settling on the mud of its trees,
A moon drinking the night and waiting,
Waving, thirsty, between its notebooks,
Water for water,
As it melts in a woman’s sugar, her summer,
Like a plant’s segment.
In Proof that I Am Not Dead – Yaseen Al-Bukali – trans. Hatem Al-Shamea
