Muhammad Afifi Matar

Muhammad Afifi Matar Poems

Muhammad Afifi Matar Biography

Muhammad Afifi Matar (1935 – 28 June 2010) was an Egyptian poet. He was born in the village of Ramalat al-Anjab in the Menoufia region of the Nile Delta. He went to school in Menouf and afterwards moved to Cairo where he studied philosophy at Ain Shams University. During the reign of Anwar Sadat, Matar left Egypt for Iraq and lived there for several years due to his difficulties with the military regime. During this period of self-imposed exile, he kept up his work as a poet and edited a literary journal called al-Aqlam. He was also a member of the Egyptian Ba'ath Party and was one of six people arrested in April 1991 on accusations of involvement in an anti-government plot. Matar is recognised as one of the more difficult of modern Arab poets. The scholar and translator Ferial Ghazoul has written: "Muhammad 'Afifi Matar [...] is known for the sophistication of his poetics, and the multiple allusions in his poetry. He is a poets' poet who has kept his trajectory apart from other literary schools and cliques. His voice is passionate and singular."[3] The poet and translator Desmond O'Grady called him "one of the most difficult poets in contemporary Arabic." Matar received numerous cultural prizes in the Middle East including the prestigious Al Owais Prize. He published more than a dozen volumes of poetry during his lifetime. A book of his poems Quartet of Joy was translated by Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden and won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. He also contributed the text to an art book called, Twilight Visions in Egypt’s Nile Delta with photographs by Ann Parker. He was honored also in Kfrazayat city with the poet Abdelghani Mustafa Abdelghani in 1986. Afifi Matar died in Cairo of liver complications.)

The Best Poem Of Muhammad Afifi Matar

Recital

This sun wears a live chemise of blood.
A wound gapes from its kneecap, wide as the wind
And horizons gush blood-springs revealing birds and palmtrees.
Peace, it stays until nightfall . . . Peace
The river women rise:
Anklets of grass twist circlets of
Silver and silt, desire wet with the water's foam;
The river women call to the birds,
With shawls wipe the glass horizon.
They weep, they shed newly warmed sorrow.
Peace, it stays until nightfall . . . Peace.
The fields folded their knees.
The ploughsocks softened, relaxed.
The serpents slept.
A pall of peace piles up: Downy hay and plume.
The bulls, standing, slumbered.
In their absent phosphoric eyes, night stars shatter.
Peace; that mask of merciful night.
The living half una wakened, the mortal half slept.
This earth seemed empty.
When the night's prayer was recited and the dream angels came,
When sleep like the sun rose with its green radiance of rebirth, its sign of illumination,
Then, by His mercy, I shed the diurnal limbs and opened a window in the mortal half;
I enfolded myself in the living half And the vision erupted:
I stepped out of the sheets' patterns and the pillows' perfume.
Have the covers left their bold arboreal designs on my face?
My face's become flying leaves, falling fruit, sprouting twigs.
An imperial mare rises in my father's house:
Space is folded for her.
The silver, the flashes of her hoofs are the lights of Granada and those lands beyond the River.
The mercury and kohl of her eyes mirror a blaze of royal ruins.
My form floats from my dream's body. I glow.
Trees spread through my face like traceries,
Freshly green tears inscribe springs and crescents of water on my features.
My form floats from my dream's body:
The star Canopies looks a trembling flower in the eyelet of the heart.
Life's blood-dimmed springs are loosed. Horses rise from the Amma of the Book, The circumference of the earth expands.
Peace, it stays until sunrise . . . Peace.
My knees grip a lodge on the horizon's ledge.
In my face crowd the lightning of writing, green leaves and water.
(The letters, a nation among nations, are addressed and entrusted.)
The birds broke out from the dome of the wind as a well breaks out.
I remember . . . it's the horizon's divan.
My body is a lodge. I reign in what's not mine, what's not others'.
I remember . . . beneath me runs that river of living images;
And the springs sported as I wished.
I remember . . . the earth's globe approached and the heavens came to me.
They exchanged garments.
The mixing of memory's creatures and the marriage of what's not male with what's female;
what's not female with what's male,
And the joys of earthly powers
Gave me the strength to conjure with the sources of memory's shattered images.
I conjured delicacies, images and chants as I wished.
The pause in the Be of the Book lingered.
joy filled with tender questions,
And the foliage of the face dropped with fresh fears
and the buds of discovery's bewilderment.
I knew I walked the way of Ascension. I dwelt in the lodge of ultimate certitude.
The circumference of the earth expanded.
The heavens appear as garments ripping
at the waistline of the living river,
A window beneath the garments of the oceans gapes open.
The Oriental Sages, the Hermetists and Gnostics partake of the banquet of luminous dialogue.

Al-Suhrawardi breathes in the fullness of space, divides bread and
the silvery fish of the Nile. He eats in the plenitude of anarchy
and drinks in the profusion of ceaseless emanation .
The Hermetists weave the cape of chants and enchantments.
They unfold it for the noble tribe, the beasts and the birds as a resting,
sheltering space for initiating and linking creatures
twice, thrice, four times and up to the last number memory may retain.
Rising from sleep the river women reveal bronzed legs, silt and earthy grass.
Peace, it stays until sunrise . . . Peace.
A mare whinnies in my father's house.
My father's house is a nomad in my dream's body.
The two Euphrates read like a book of rising blood And the Nile is a book.
The Ocean pulls off the garments of diffused blood.
Then the desert's dressed, the large land and the cracked ruins adorned by the splendor of lightning,
by the green life of fire.
The sun penetrates the flanks of night with purple gloves
and stockings of hammered and unhammered gold.
It rises and falls.
He descends to the murmur of vermin, the clinging of insects, the slither Of reptiles.
The steps shorten.
I rapped myself in the tatters of the diurnal half.
The smell of nocturnal sleep spread
And the woolen covers heaved.
The wet cotton covers collapsed.
Peace, a spider of blood, clothed by the features' similarity Peace.
Water drains from the body.
Memory drains from the water.

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