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
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