When Pain Slumbers
by Eman Al-Saeedi
translated by Hatem Al-Shamea
(1)
The chemistry of the universe,
Bodies of pallor.
There,
Where the green face of humanity withers
Like the veins of an aged wind.
(2)
In an existence of anxiety,
Half of it blood, and half of it whiteness.
For the fragility of silence it leans on a bullet,
And the hips of cities are the most lustful gravity.
(3)
Oh how the layers of misery sigh with the formation of ice.
(4)
…………..
…………………
(5)
March 26, 2015
A frightened date –
The dance of death since the start of oppression.
The science of sounds stuck in its genes.
It applauds for tragedy, for blood. For grief, for the final breath.
It studies how to compose between the rhythm of shelling, and
mercy,
Between war, and love, between cowardice, and dream, and
between nations like a tortured hell.
(6)
The light piercing through the cracks of the unknown,
A beekeeper like the first slumber,
And the silence escaping from the lips of gunpowder cloaks
itself in the clamor of the brightest party.
(7)
Language,
Besieged between the rubble of war,
Like a virgin poem in the heart of a poet with no cathartic outlet,
Only there it lives, dies, and is resurrected.
(8)
The candles of birth are hidden on the shelves of a childhood
amputated of dreams.
Like the birthday of the exodus from paradise.
(9)
The apple of Adam,
Crippled on the eyelids of earth,
Carves a hole to hell.
(10)
Humans,
Structures bloated with lust.
In the soul of clay it moans, and does not conceal itself on the
bed of a body of life.
(11)
Nothing here,
Except death walking dazzled by the blindness of inhumanity.
The gunpowder forced to absorb the pulse of the earth,
Daring ruin.
And here the gods,
Watch mercies stuck in the shears of war,
Did not set the wheel of death towards a field of nothingness.
A New Home – Nabila Al-Sheikh – trans. Hatem Al-Shamea
