Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (3 page)

– Are you tired from walking

My child, are you tired?

– Yes, Father

Your night on the track was long,

And the heart flowed on the earth of your night.

– You are still as light as a cat,

Climb on my shoulder,

We will soon be crossing

The last wood of terebinth and holm oak.

This is Northern Galilee

Lebanon is behind us,

The whole sky is ours from Damascus

To the lovely walls of Acre.

– Then what?

– We shall go home

Do you know the way my child?

– Yes, Father:

East of the carob tree on the main street

Is a small path, hemmed in with prickly pear

At first, then, ever wider and wider, it leads to the well,

Then it looks out over the vineyard

That belongs to Uncle Jamil, who sells tobacco and sweets,

Then it loses itself in a threshing floor before

Straightening out and settling at the house,

in the form of a parrot.

– Do you know the house, my child?

– I know it as I know the path:

Jasmine around a gate of iron,

And bars of sunlight on the stone steps

Sunflowers gazing into the beyond

Tame bees preparing breakfast for grandfather

On the rattan tray,

And in the courtyard of the house, a well and a willow tree and a horse

And behind the hedge, a tomorrow, leafing through our pages…

– Father, are you tired?

I see sweat in your eyes.

– My son, I am tired… Will you carry me?

– Just as you carried me, Father,

So shall I carry this longing

For

My beginnings and its beginnings,

And I shall walk this road to

My end… and its end!

A horse dancing on two strings – thus

Do his fingers listen to his blood, and the villages are spread out

Like red windflowers in the rhythm. No

Night there, no day. We are touched

By a heavenly joy, and directions rush into

Matter

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

All things will begin anew

*

He is the owner of the old oud, and our neighbour

In the oak wood. He bears his time disguised

In the garb of a madman who sings.

The war had ended,

And the ashes of our village, hidden by a black cloud, had not

Witnessed the birth of the Phoenix yet, as

We had expected. The night's blood was not dry on

The shirts of our dead. Crops had not sprouted, as

Forgetfulness expects, in the helmets of the soldiers

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

All things will begin anew

*

Like the rest of the desert, space is rolled back from time

A distance sufficient for the poem to explode. Isma'il would

Descend among us by night, and sing: ‘O stranger,

I am the stranger and you from me, O stranger!'

The desert roams in the words and the words ignore the power

Of things. Return, O Oud… with what is lost and sacrifice me

On it, from far off to far off

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

All Things will begin anew

*

Meaning travels with us… we fly from ledge to

Marble ledge. And race between two blue chasms.

It is not our dreams that are awake, nor the guards of this place

Leave Isma'il's space. There is no earth there

And no sky. A common joy touched us before

The Limbo of two strings. Isma'il… sing

For us so that everything becomes possible, close to existence

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

All things will begin anew

*

In Isma'il's Oud the Sumerian wedding is raised

To the extremities of the sword. There is no non-existence there

And no existence. We have been touched by a lust to create:

From one string there flows water. From two strings fire is ignited.

From the three of them flashes forth Woman/Being/

Revelation. Sing, Isma'il, for meaning a bird hovers

At dusk over Athena between two dates…

Sing a funeral on a celebration day

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

All things will begin anew

*

Under the poem: the strange horses pass over. The wagons

Pass over the backs of the prisoners. Under it pass

Oblivion and the Hyksos. There pass the lords of the time,

The philosophers, Imru' al'Qais, grieving for a morrow

Cast down at Caesar's gates. They all pass under

The poem. The contemporary Past, like Timur Lenk,

Passes under it. The prophets are there, they also pass under

And hearken to Isma'il's voice, as he sings: O stranger,

I am the stranger, I am like you, O stranger to this house,

Return… O Oud bringing what is lost, and sacrifice me on yourself,

Vein to vein

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

All things will begin anew

I know the house from the sage bush. The first of

The windows leans out towards the butterflies… blue…

Red. I know the line of clouds, and at which

Well the village women will wait in summer. I know

What the dove says as it lays its eggs on the muzzle

Of the rifle. I know who opens the door to the jasmine

Which opens our dreams in to the evening's guests.

*

The strangers' carriage has not yet arrived

*

No one has come. So leave me there, just as

You leave greeting at the door of the house. For me

Or for another, and pay no attention to who will hear it

First. And leave me there a word for myself:

Was I alone ‘alone as the soul in

A body'? When you said one day: I love you both,

You and the water. Water gleamed in everything,

Like a guitar which had given itself to weeping!

*

The strangers' guitar has not yet arrived

*

Let us be kind! Take me to the sea at

Sunset so that I may hear what the sea says to you

When it returns to itself peacefully, peacefully.

I shall not change myself. I shall hide myself in a wave

And say: Take me to the sea again. That is what

Those who fear do to themselves: they go to

The sea when they are tormented by a star that has burnt itself in the sky

*

The stranger's song has not yet arrived

*

I know the house by the fluttering kerchiefs. The first pigeon

That laments on my shoulders. And beneath the sky

Of the Gospels a child is rushing for no reason. The water rushes,

And the cypress rushes, and the breeze rushes in

The breeze and the earth rushes in itself. I said:

Do not hasten to leave the house. There is nothing

To prevent this place from waiting awhile

Here, until you put on the day dress and pull on

The shoes of air

*

The strangers' legend has not yet arrived

*

No one has come. So leave me there, as

You leave the tale in anyone who sees you, and weeps

And rushes off in himself, of his own happiness:

How much I love you! How much you are you! and intimidated by his own soul:

There is no I now, but she is now in me. No she, but I am in her fragility. How I fear

For my dream, lest it see a dream that is not she at

The end of this song…

*

No one has come

Perhaps the strangers have missed the way

To the strangers' walk!

You have a retreat in the solitude of the carob trees,

O dark-voiced sunset bells! What

Do they want from you now? You sought

Adam's garden, so that the sullen killer might conceal his brother,

And were locked up in yourself

When the dead man was opened up at his large

And you took yourself off to your own affairs: as absence takes itself off

To its own many preoccupation. So, be

Awake. Raven, our resurrection will be postponed!

*

There is no night sufficient for us to dream twice. There is one

Gate to our heaven. Whence comes our end?

We are the offspring of the beginning. We see only

The beginning, so unite with the weather-side of your night, as a diviner

Preaches void what the human void leaves behind it:

The eternal echo around you…

You stand accused of what is in us. This is the first

Blood of our race before you. Leave

Cabel's new house.

As the mirage leaves

The ink of your feathers, O Raven

*

For me there is a retreat in the night of your voice… for me an absence

Rushing between the shadow that binds me.

 So I bind the bull's horn. The unseen drives me, I drive it

It raises me and I raise it to the ghost that hangs like

A ripe aubergine. Are you then? And what

Do they want now from us after they have stolen my words from

Your words, then slept upright in my dream

On spears. I was not a ghost that they should walk

In my footsteps. Be my second brother:

I am Abel, the dust returns me

To you as a carob tree, so that you may perch on my branch, O Raven

*

I am you in words. One book unites us.

The ashes that lie on you are mine,

In the shadow we were merely two witnesses, two victims

Two poems

Two poems

About Nature, while desolation concludes its feast

*

The Qur'an shall enlighten you:

‘Then God sent a raven who scratched the ground.

To show him how to hide the shame of his brother.

“Woe is me!” said he; “Was I not even able to be as this raven?”'

The Qur'an shall enlighten you,

So search about for our resurrection, and hover, O Raven!

My steed is commensurate with the sky. I have dreamt

what will happen in the afternoon. The Tatars used

to ride beneath me and beneath the sky: dreaming of nothing

beyond the tents they would erect. Knowing nothing

of the destinies of our goats in the coming blasts of winter.

My steed is commensurate with the evening. The Tatars used

to insert their names in the roofs of villages, like swallows,

and would slumber safely in our cornfields;

they would not dream of what would happen in the afternoon, when

the sky returns, slowly, slowly,

to its own people in the evening

*

We have one dream: that the air flow

as a friend, diffusing the aroma of Arab coffee

over the hills that enclose summer and strangers…

*

I am my own dream. When the earth has grown narrow, I have made it wide

With a swallow's wing, and grown larger. I am my own dream…

In crowds I am filled with the reflection of myself and my questions

About stars which walk on the two feet of one whom I love

And in my exile there are ways for pilgrims to Jerusalem –

The words plucked out like feathers over the stones,

How many prophets does the city want so as to preserve the name

Of its father and regret: ‘It was not in war that I fell'?

How much sky does it change, in every people,

So that its red shawl might amaze it? O my dream…

Gaze not at us so!

Do not be the last of the martyrs!

*

I fear for my dream from the clarity of the butterfly

And from the mulberry stains over the whinnying of the horse

I fear for it from the father and the son and those crossing

Over the Mediterranean coast in search of the gods

And the gold of those who went before,

I fear for my dream from my hands

And from a star which stands

At my shoulder waiting to sing

*

To us, the people of ancient nights, we have our customs

In climbing to the Moon of rhyme

We accept our dreams as true, and give the lie to our days,

Our days have not all been with us since the Tatars came,

And now here they are, getting ready to move on

Forgetting our days, behind them. Soon we will go down

To our life in the fields. We will make flags

From white bed sheets, if we must have

A flag, let it be blank,

Without fussy symbols… let us be peaceful

Lest we fly our dreams after the strangers' caravan

*

We have one dream: to find

A dream carrying us

As the star carries the dead!

The train went swiftly by.

I was waiting

On the platform for a train that had gone,

And the passengers departed to get on with

Their days… And I

Was still waiting

*

Violins lament in the distance,

A cloud carries me

Away, and breaks up

*

Longing for things obscure

Would recede and approach,

There was no forgetting that would draw me away,

No remembering that would draw me close

To a woman

Who, if the moon touched her,

Would cry out: ‘I am the moon’

*

The train went swiftly by,

My time was not with me

On the platform,

The time was different,

What is the time now?

Which day was it, that

Divided yesterday from tomorrow,

When the gypsies departed?

*

Here I was born and not born

My stubborn birth shall be completed then

By this train

And the trees shall walk around me

*

I am here and not here

In this train I shall find out

my soul, filled

By both banks of a river which had died between them

As youth dies

‘Wish that youth were stone…’

*

The train went swiftly by

Past me, I am

Like the station, not knowing

Whether to bid farewell or greet the people:

Welcome to my platforms

Cafes,

Offices,

Flowers,

Telephone,

Newspapers,

Sandwiches,

Music,

And a rhyme,

By another poet who comes and waits

*

The train went swiftly by

Past me, and I

Am still waiting.