Aida Vidan 

Übersetzer:in

Plow of God,
who tills the fasting
soul

and clears the stones
from beneath your sharp blade,

breathe into the stone mounds
and the Brač field
the salt of endurance.
 
Sow dragon seed,
plant angel wings.

May whatever sprouts
grow slowly
into the thirsty eye of dreams
and the crystal of snows.

Let the fruit be  
small, desiccated,
bittersweet.

May the spirits of table and hills
break unleavened bread
in the clearings.

Like mica embraced by an olive tree,
a kiss shared by
two mouths.

The way the sea
caresses the island,
slowly, steadily,
 
so shall we,
children of God’s providence,
come to love ourselves again.

A broken ray sinks into the green,
and the city, which lasts on the far-away shore,
hard and surreal, melts the weft of memory
falling ever more deeply into the shady cellars.
The numbers of happy years are erased;
pain and tenderness – all fits in a fist,
with a couple of names, squares and the stench of the port.

A phantom-like ocher portmaster’s office,
hovers wearily in the space of the centuries.
As if I had never been there, diminutive,
lost among the old palm trees
sensing all possible disasters and delicate
deaths, with my back turned towards the darkened palace.

And before me, alas, was that the sea?

Hampstead Heath, June 2, 1984

In the green valley of the Nile
while traveling in a fast train
I saw a peasant
on a small white donkey
as he was wading through a field
of rice. A man in a long white
robe, a prophet of the past
or future arrivals
to Earth.

He could have been Joseph
or his grown up step son,
perhaps even Kalki,
the last incarnation
of the Indian god from a picture of the
triumvirate.

An Egyptian in a white
galabeah, sitting aside
on the white donkey,
what does he mean to me?

All I have said about
the advent, between
the before and the after, and above all
that which is: a plowman on
a donkey, much white
on the background of green.
White
on the green.

Alexandria-Cairo, November 20, 1999