Elegy Number One Poem by Nouri al Jarrah

To have gone back to Damascus
to have been able to.
To have left England,
to have opened a door in winter
and found all-glorious summer behind each opening.

Now... here... always...
England... with or without Damascus.
England, a grey time,
a shuddering of limbs,
and no escape
from the entanglement of leaf and thorn.
yet... Despair? Hope?
The day unbends.

To have gone back
and found Damascus...
something lacking,
completed,
was all mine.

Indifferent time topples thousands...
under weeping graves...
the assassinated and the assassin lie...

Judgement proceeds
with proud, respected gait,
the witness in his tattered clothes.
There goes the infant,
the orphaned life,
and the narrator... he... who encloses the sea
with his short story,
[writing what he sees];
often, he moved on further,
still writing what he saw.
Length and width, be probed the clamour,
then...
returning, he stretched and said:
I am the sleeping writer -
he seemed as dead as they were,
yet, he was fresh
as the flower in his hand.

To have found this door
To have found this hole of past eternity
and having found those simple pleasures...
a stroll ... no more than the remnants of voices
crushed by the crowd
engulfing the incoming rain.
The whisper of the past buttressed by the evening sky...
a whinnying horse moves across the frame...
fresh blood gushes from my shoulder...

Translated by Nawar al-Hassan