Hazem Sheikho 

Übersetzer:in

He loses his bearings every day

when he looks down to the end of a street

and it does not lead to a mountain.

After a minute

he remembers that he left that city

where all streets lead to a mountain.

He loses his compass

and he learns that he who loses a mountain is no longer himself.

He recognizes the curse.

Those who lose their mountains

Do not send me a video

cities are not streets and squares

I don’t want photo albums

who said that life is a catalogue?

don’t bother yourself straining for that 

panoramic shot 

the city’s photos are reflections in the water of a deep well

and I don’t want my city to fall into the well

my memory fogs

vanishes streets and gardens

and I don’t know

if they’ve only vanished in memory

or in the reality of the city?

I’ve forgotten half the things I knew

forgetting is a hole in the head’s ozone layer.

I no longer remember –  

is the library on the right or left of the square?

is the university on a river

or beside a lake?

Lend me your eyes

for a day

for an hour

for a minute

so Damascus will not vanish

from anybody’s head.

The fading of the music that you’re hooked on changes your whole self

as when you’re raided by unnameable odors

that remind you of hospital corridors.

You’re a changed whole self when you see that you are here

although everything around you is a mirage

and those who see you, see a mirage only.

You’re whole self changes

with the alienation of the senses:

walk now as a stranger among beautiful women

and among their even more beautiful cars.

Walk, stranger, between two old women

who dream of a medicine to get themselves into hospital

where they can take their medicine.

Walk, stranger, to face the small look

Of the girl who is smaller than even a look.

And be a stranger in the strange place

As if you were that same strange place.

And be that stranger who memorizes passing faces

face by face

as if they were the rest of his family

who he can only start to care about

if the faces keep their truce with this new place

and be that stranger facing everything

as if your self were nothing.

If I were a bird I would not descend to earth

even drinking water I would do in the clouds.

If I were a horse I would not stop galloping

and if I became hungry I would eat the wind.

If I were a tree I would not stop growing

until I reached a place where I could no longer see what I was.

If I were a river I would flood both banks

so that my empty river bed could experience thirst.

And if I were a human

I would kill wishing.

Since they’ve left

the only place we can meet

is in the dream.

They wait for us every day

with clothes cleaned

and beards shaven

as is fitting for dates.

They reproach our eyes

if they don’t shut quickly

and it grieves them if they touch daybreak in those eyes.

They want us to stay here

because they are bored

While we use important things as an excuse

to leave them so we can return to our lives

where all we can do is wait for them again. 

Is it us who wakes to catch them up?

Or is it them who falls asleep to join us?

We all are absent

from them

and from ourselves.

We’re just lacking a death to reunite the family.

Passersby on the pavement:

Day and night, they walk

Before the war

City hall used to close the pavement

And write: “under repair”

Day and night, they walk

To repair the pavement with steps.

The children:

They don’t care

What is really important is to go,

Even to God,

Wearing Eid clothes

The beautiful girls:

From their eyes’ glitters

We know how envious the sky was

To a degree that it invented lightning

And when the summer approached

It viciously sent rockets.

The mother:

Because I was afraid for my children

I got pregnant.

A bored man:

Thank you bullets, thank you cannons, thank you war:

Finally, finally,

The mosquitoes have disappeared.

The woman and her poet:

When I talk to you, you feel like writing

You go to your papers

Like a sleepwalker.

I, if you knew, got dancing from you

And this bombing is just rhythms,

Just rhythms

The neighbor’s son:

He threw it from the window

And wrote to her:

“That mattress, which held your scent, 

came from the new émigrés.”

The soldier who runs carrying his bleeding daughter:

He threw his weapon

He threw his short leave paper

And ran in crying.

When he came back without her

He told his wife:

“Satin is her skin……and all hands, all hearts are gunpowder.”

I write to you from the outskirts of a massacre.

The air smells of blood.

Tonight’s silence tastes of dried up hatred.

Right now while I hammer on the keyboard

others are hammering their chests crying

and they bang their heads against walls and against walls of thin air.

While they call out, tormented, into the ears of their dead.

I call out to you through my keyboard

as if I were bereaved,

 the widow and the orphan.

I call out to you in the fever of fresh pain.

I write so that I can call you,

not to make you reply or come,

but to check how much calling I have left.

Beautiful women scare me more now than checkpoints

more than missiles and planes.

The Beautiful makes me lament.

The Beautiful is a nightmare.

Don’t talk to me about woman

don’t tell me: her lips are peaches

her bosom is the church’s bell

her waist is as delicate as crying.

I think only of her corpse.

I know it is 10 am

I know it is the 8th of June

but I’m not actually certain of either of these facts.

I’m not certain

if this is a garden!

And I do not know why its flowers smell of gunpowder!

And if those are windows

or dead eyes?

Is this rain or the dribble of someone being tortured?

And that thing soaring swiftly

like a black thunderbolt

(from low to high)

is it a bird or is it a scream?

I know it is 10

this morning or maybe on yesterday morning

or even on a morning of an old year.

But there is really no morning

they’ve kidnapped the sun

and the light remaining cannot pay its ransom to the clouds.

I have known it is 10 for hours

or for days

but I do not know where I am!

Neither does the past pass

nor does the present reveal its presence.

Everything existing is this 10 am,

which turns everything else into mere speculation.