NOT AS A FOREIGN TOURIST DOES
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Volume XLIV, Issue 3, Summer 2005
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0044.306
I walked on what remains of the heart,
three abandoned churches,
villages like dots erased from their letters,
and a young girl on the grass reading what
looks like poetry: if I were older,
if I were older, the wolf would have surrendered to me!
. . . I wasn't sentimental, or a Don Juan
so I didn't lie down on the grass beside her, but I did
say to myself: if I were younger,
if I were twenty years younger
I would have shared the sandwiches and the water with her,
and taught her how to touch the rainbow.
I walked, as a foreign tourist does . . .
a camera with me, and my guide a little book
containing poems that describe this place
I feel as if I were the speaker in them,
and had it not been for the difference in rhyme
I would have said: I am another.
. . . I used to follow the description of the place. Here
are excess trees, and here is an incomplete moon.
And as in poems, grass sprouts
over an aching stone. It is not a dream
nor is it a symbol that leads to a national bird,
it is a cloud that has ripened . . .
I took one step, two steps, three . . . I found spring
too short for the apricots. As soon as I gazed
into the almond blossom I scattered between
two dimples, I walked to follow what the little
birds had left of freckles in the poem.
Then I wondered: how does the place become
a reflection of its image in myth,
or an adjective of speech?
And is a thing's image stronger
If it weren't for my imagination
my other self would have told me:
I wasn't realistic. But I don't believe
the Iliad's military history,
it's a poem, a myth creating reality . . .
And I wondered: had the camera and the media
been witnesses above the walls of Asian Troy,
would Homer have written other than the Odyssey?
. . . I hold this delicious air,
the Galilee air, with both of my hands
and I chew it the way mountain goats chew
I walk, I introduce myself to itself:
you, O self, are one of the adjectives of the place.
Three abandoned churches,
villages like dots erased from their letters,
and a young girl on the grass asking a specter:
why did you grow up and not wait for me?
He tells her: I wasn't present
when the silk robe got too tight for two apples,
so sing, as you were singing a while ago:
if I were older, if I were older . . .
As for me, I will enter the mulberry trees
where the silk worm makes me into a silk thread,
then I'll enter a woman's needle in
then I'll fly like a shawl with the wind . . .
Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah
baratheonpilled
titsay
