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Another nice collection of Arabic poetry in English is online at Kikah.
Among the poets there is the innovative free verse pioneer Badr Shakir al-Sayyab who died in 1964 as the Tammuzi poets’ moment was drawing to a close. His poem Return to Jaykur starts like this:
on the grey horse of a dream
fled the outstretched vistas,
fled the marketplace teeming with vendors,
fled the weary morning,
the barking night, the quiet passers-by,
the gloomy light,
fled the wine-drenched landlord,
fled the shame decked in flowers
and death in its leisurely stroll
along the river’s drowsy currents.
If only its waters would wake up,
if only the Virgin would come to drink,
if only the blood-drenched setting sun
would immerse herself within these banks,
or else just rise.
And if only the branches of night
would burst into leaf,
if the brothel would close its door to its customers.
If only…reading all this poetry, especially the Iraqi poetry, makes one squirm a little with the uneasiness of knowing what has become of the “if only’s” in that region. “Return to Jaykur” blends these observations of desert life with Christian images in a way which seems startling given the cultural conditioning of the present moment that leads us to believe that there is a clean break between this world and that. Lines like:
when death’s silence dwells inside my home,
when night settles in my fire?
Who will lift the burden of my cross
in this long night of dread?
Who would cry out, who would answer to the hungry,
care for the destitute?
Who would lower Jesus from His cross,
who would drive the vultures from His wounds,
remove the lid of darkness from His dawn?
Who would replace His thorns with a crown of laurels?
Jaykur, if you would only hear –
if you would only just be there –
if you would only give birth to a soul,
even an aborted, stunted soul,
as travelers could behold a star
to illuminate the night.
For those without a path
…could be lifted from a myriad of human experience located out of any time and place. If anything, retreading some of this thirty or forty year old poetry is taking me to a time when in fact the Middle East and the Far West were involved in an incredibly rich and sophisticated and complex relationship of culture and politics. I think it is a mistake now to assume that this is no longer true, that we in the West are only bound to these poetic voices from the East because of economic or global political imperatives. The fact is, and this is perhaps a great secret, we share much history and culture and our current societies owe much to our joint origins which course through our social veins like so many blood memories, stretching from 2003 back to our shared beginnings in the mud of Mesopotamia.
