Three Poems of Love and Desire by Nouri Al-Jarrah

Nouri al-Jarrah 

Salah Abdoh, translating with Maryam Haidari, presents three poems by one of his favorite living poets in the Arabic language, Nouri al-Jarrah, long exiled from the Assads’ Syria. Here are three poems of love and desire, composed in Beirut during the darkest days of the civil war, and war within war.

I Saw You

Yesterday I saw you, yesterday
you and I were in town;
me, watching you pass,
you, not watching;
a hundred sentinels posted at the doors –
weapons in hand,
broad shouldered –
shattered to pieces
to become shadows,
sentinels of your sleep. 

In life, in Death

In life and in death
I love you.
You are the reign of wakefulness,
the heart’s insurrection,
the chaos of an undying day;
you are objects in moments of transformation. 

In life and in death,
in recklessness, 
and through those intervals of darkness
in the balcony of oblivion, 
I love you. 

On streets clogged with soldiers and stones, 
and in the fork on the road to bewilderment

I love you. 

The moon enters a room 
alone;
still,
I cannot love you with one life
alone. 

So with the first and last spirit assigned to me
I shred the flowers of the soul and arrive at eternity.

In life and in death,
in the wilderness of spite,
and days of doubt
when men harvest a lethal blossom 
and exchange daggers and bullets and blows,

I love you. 

In life, in death
and in bitter vigilance. 

I Speak of a Woman

I speak of a woman
a woman who descends the staircase in a fury,
to kiss me and say:
“Don’t misunderstand me ….” 

A woman who exiles me from her lips,
then takes me to bed.

I speak of a woman who recalls in fury her feet
a woman who calls me a scoundrel
and in the end insists 
that I
am a man made of clay.

Her hair was the long poem
she sang in the room,
and in the balcony
she contemplated
God’s blood orange sunset.

Love –
grief’s apple.
She was a drawing on the wall
of my house,
a white cherry blossom tree
in my garden. 

                                    Beirut, Winter 1982-1983