Three Poems
Memory of a father by Samira Negrouche
For Djamal Amrani
"Passive as a bird who sees
all, in his flight, and keeps in his heart
while he flies through the sky the consciousness
that does not forgive" – Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poesia en forma di rosa
A memory of a father
lives in my deep solitudes
Rimbaud’s solitudes
and his rotting leg
amputated
at conception
*
legs and basements
rotten
to finish off poets like
the soul of Jean Sénac
who don’t stop
haunting me
*
must make do with that
be born with that
and sperm spilled
into wombs
as fast as possible
discharged into the body
and the shadows
*
a knee places itself
gently on the fold of life
then all of the head and the body
take shape
in the imperfect curve
of that leopard man
at the start of the race
and they take off to caress
the horizon
*
it’s a wandering
soul
in search of memory
solitary, forgetful
intending to wash
in torrents of rain
and blood
*
memory of your back
impotent, arthritic
and the lead weights
never entirely
detached from it
*
you still bow down
in front of heavy
black shoes
you bow down before
your own legs in short pants
fleeing the furious violent
schoolmaster
*
still you bow down
before your mother’s mountains, the Djurdjura
and your tears of mourning
the ones hidden behind
closed, dirty windowpanes
farewells one does not want to
utter
that one never knows how to
pronounce
that you go on
tearing
from the genealogy
of my words
Translated from the French (Algeria) by Marilyn Hacker
***
Between Two Cells
For Mazen Darwish, and all the prisoners of the Syrian regime
I hear your voice light up the next cell
and the question occurs to me
Where does the guard change his clothes
when he goes from your cell to mine?
How does he shift the letters on his lips
without one of the two ‘‘enemy’’ languages breaking
—a language in despair since its creation,
gloomy since infancy, lame
oblique
deceitful
that manages, once it’s beautified itself
to trap its neighbor, enthralled
in undoing the good-luck charms of its childhood
—a language with malleable meanings
engrossed by the charms of exegesis,
barefoot, like a dancer bent backward,
her anklets linking the text’s foot
to the sultan’s desire.
How does he change the letters on his lips,
a guard who pronounces words badly
when he goes from my cell to yours?
*
Are you smoking?
Reach your hand out between the bars
I’ll light your cigarette for you,
the last one in the pack
Inhale its smoke in secret
so the guard doesn’t take it away.
The light here is dim,
no star knows this wounded horizon.
Draw up a little sunlight from your heart,
it will gouge out the eye of darkness
*
The guard’s face here, root of a chronic death
and mirror of a massacre there.
The guard’s face there, bloody with defeats
he only describes in secret.
Since he hasn’t learned the role of victim
he dresses in his wolf costume
to hunt down a letter in a poem and riddle it with wounds.
The guard’s face there,
memory of a surrender heavy with stories
*
To the guards here and there, a weakness like dry grass
if each one wasn’t leaning on a rifle
that stands guard over the dunes of his fear,
a confession throbbing in a song.
And if they exchange a few insults
the aim is clear,
they are only juggling masks.
They are a pair of twins,
they have one umbilical cord,
there where their shadow fell on the earth
a slaughter follows a slaughter.
*
I hear your voice, the brushing of pine needles
as it climbs the steps of prayer
then exhales the perfectly baked bread of freedom
toward a heart open to the winds
To the prisoners here and those there
a single heart
that gets drunk on a breath of freedom
*
I have comrades in prison
who turn each night, penitent, toward pillows of hope
Hunger devours them
Thirst withers them
yet they persist in adorning the hip of our shattered age
with a flock of freed birds
Translated from the Arabic (Syria) by Marilyn Hacker
***
Calligraphies V by Marilyn Hacker
Late fall, near midnight,
walking home alone from a
loquacious dinner,
I saw, heard, cop cars, sirens,
thought: There’s a big fire somewhere.
Japanese tourists
descend from buses now, take
attack-site selfies.
Illegal demonstrations.
Terrorism: déjà vu.
*
Déjà vu, hard rain
after unseasonable
blue bright mornings.
You Google whom you once loved:
wedding photo at fifty,
face, body, thickened,
shrunk, out of your fantasies.
And what would you say
who said so much once over
those neutral restaurant tables?
*
Winter’s not neutral:
damp infiltrates bronchial
passages. You’ve coughed
since that Burgundy Christmas
pneumonia, twenty years past.
But light’s coming back.
But a medical student
blew himself up in
a square in Sultanahmet
where you’ve been a tourist too.
*
She’s been arguing,
she’s fed up with rhetoric,
easy amalgams.
You dip bread in olive oil,
then dip it in the za’atar.
Back from Geneva,
with comrades at peace talks that
aren’t going to happen —
You proofread her news-brief, see
how her frayed shirt is ripping.
*
Attention fraying
in late afternoon light, soon
day will be done, not
the work incumbent on it
— whatever that might have been –
Gnarls of an old text
in the other alphabet:
can I unknot them,
reweave a mirror fabric
of the unraveled phrases?
*
A day unravels
that she, he, they spent waiting
in line in rain in
administrative limbo
or the emergency room.
Are you immigrants
or political exiles
or refugees? Words
with different valences in
subliminal translation.
*
Liminal space where
exiles with dictionaries
lose themselves: barzakh,
Arabic isthmus, the span
from death to resurrection
in Farsi: limbo,
where Socrates murmurs to
unbaptized babies
in contrapuntal cognates
they hear fardous, paradise.
*
Infantile, senile,
when I read out loud I stop,
stammer and stutter
then pronounce everything wrong.
An illiterate lover
worse than the peasant
accents of emigrants who
return years later
to the villages where their
mothers did not learn to read.
*
My mother would read
to me- fables, fairy tales—
until the day
I said I could read them my-
self, and I did. I was three.
My mother would read
my notebooks, search desk drawers
while I was at school.
I had to tear up and flush
my revolts down the toilet.
*
Down the rain-splashed street,
try not to keep your eyes down
while the sky weighs down
on the wrong side of winter.
You don’t forget you aren’t young.
Still, there’s arrival—
the desposeidos’ priest
makes time for welcome,
more liminal narratives
over midnight bacalão.