When that happens
When they are liberated from the book, from the riddle of the miracle, and start to roam
like open suitcases down the lanes of nearby villages
with faces uncovered and smiles that are hard to believe,
When their feet touch earth and they pick up stones,
only because these remember their distant childhoods
and their cracked fingers
furrowed by the curse,
When he hears his dog’s monotonous barking
coming as though from wells abandoned
in the hidden foothills of memories, his dog
who has limped wounded along the riverbank
since the soldiers killed it there thirty years ago.
When the new houses on the mountain disappear
into the twilight
with the construction sites and cranes, haphazard
cabins of the workmen and guards,
and a single light remains whose source he cannot see,
like a secret spring pulling off its mask to breathe,
When he sees the dead trees and the trees
uprooted by the dozers, the woodcutters’ saws, the muffled hatchets,
rising from the furrows,
beginning to gather up their branches
with the sureness of the dead, with a ghost’s mistrust,
rising from their fabricated forms—
the seats in the sitting rooms, benches in the parks,
the shelves and desks in offices, austere cafe chairs;
from the cupboards, leaving the clothes suspended in air like
bodies upheld without hope—
and walking to the mountain,
a happy family
coming home from the masquerade.
When he sees the children,
forgotten by the dead patrols and betrayed columns...
***
What the sniper told his widow
I see a circle of light, nothing else.
No heart, no sadness, no memories, no shadow.
Just two, alone in the circle of light.
I choose him, just him, without a past or family,
without a woman or land or home to support,
then I hold him a moment, or two,
just him,
alone now in the circle of light,
but he does not see me.
She did not describe things well.
So I go home, to make sure that my fear is safe with me,
and that you are waiting.
Nothing lets me sleep
save you are waiting and the fear.
***
Guide for the lost and his seven nights
On the fifth night
I read the poets of the Aegean and listened to the storytellers of the archipelago, the islands’ wonders, the boasts of the Spartans, the feats of the gods,
but I loved Yasser Arafat more:
sprightly and small, with his supple Egyptian twang.
We came from many cities on the Mediterranean coast. We liberated slaves and altered destinies and built towers and ploughed fallow fields, and never stayed for long.
We raided the night in its darkness, and followed the sea lanes and the barges of the mourning women, and we saw the ghost ships which resemble elegies.
In exile, we made brothers of hyenas,
and we sent messages and messengers to the rainforests in the north,
and we seduced the mountains and the winds,
and we saw everything.
On the sixth night
I left my horse to go alone to Cordoba.
On the seventh night,
my stars read, my purpose manifest, my time here at an end,
I gathered myself and climbed alone the road to Ithaca.
***
When we lost the war
Where is the war? We were not beaten, but we lost it.
We were spared so we might love,
said the soldier to his dead friend,
and past them flapped a bird and clouds went by.
Don’t despair, said a girl to the well as she gave its dark back.
Let it go.
(Excerpted from Strangers in Light Coats, translated by Robin Moger, with permission from Seagull Books)
