Khaled Juma Poems

'Await not that I play for you…'
Says the flute maker to the strange moon,
'I am but a flute maker'
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My face is the forests' unease. I occupy a chapter in the tale. I sleep with one eye open, puzzling the night, star by star. Solitary, I arrange seasons, and trees. Solitary, I make imaginings from fear. I induct the words of a scared rabbit to make my fable. I am the wolf, unsurpassed. Only I know the roads that curve and turn in the mountain's slope. Only I hide the distress in a rock on which a shepherd sits with his flute, dripping sadness, not knowing that I am right behind him, memorizing the melody to repeat as howls on assumptions of hills.

My claw is the tale's pen, lightening my way whenever the smell of homes reaches my tame forest. Homes are the death of the wildness in us. When we befriended their owners, we became dogs, guarding goats from the assaults of our brothers. We sit planted like gratis soldiers at masters' doors. We glorify the moment they release our necks from collars of imprisonment, having entirely forgotten how we were the freedom of land, time and magic spells. We have totally forgotten our children, who we left in battles with nights and wails. We forgot and we attacked them as if we never knew them. They killed us. We killed them, and did not notice that the circles in the lake's water were the place's cries for what we have become. We did not notice, not for a moment that our names have also changed.
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To the boy abandoned at the edge of a homeland abandoned at the edge of a boy

What would I tell you if I were there?
You scream with two legs folded underneath you, blood streaming from a place in your body I do not know, I feel horror sneaking into your tender soul, as they are about to attack you, not only with words, but with a Talmudic history mobilized like a war machine aged a million years. In every one of their pockets is a Torah, in every one of their eyes is a gun and in every one of their hands is a heart, afraid of a twelve-year-old boy, abandoned on the roadside. Were you an easy hunt? Even in jungles, predators sometimes hesitate to hunt a little one when they're hungry, they smell the milk off the newborn's lip and turn back, perhaps, they transcend from preying on a little defenseless child who cannot even escape. However, they all were there, and the others wished to be there, so they sent their thoughts instead.
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-1-
Nobody raised me to love you. My mother did not plant virtues of death in her tales. My father did not tell me that men had to die in order to be Men. He said, take the city's distress off her eyes, and she shall love you forever; and at that moment of my death, and in the long time between my stand and my fall, I saw her, with my heart, I saw her, crying and smiling, while calls for prayer arose like a premade ritual.

-2-
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Tomorrow, I shall die
Like everyone alive, I shall die
Death will not warn me
Will not give me a chance to say, any last words
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Beware of the spear. Master of death is behind the mountain, detaining two lovers whom he gave hearts of steel. He sat smacking his lips on the rock at the gateway of Poets and Gods. No one knows where the knights have gone. As if it is another era, unmeant for anyone to grasp. About her eyes, the sculpture at the entrance of the cave speaks of battles fought by the Gods for her morning flower.
In the legend of slaughter, it was said that the Little God had a charm that enticed all women's hearts, but an oracle told him, while he was out hunting hearts off the top of the Mountain of Gods, that a day will come when eyes of a woman would turn him into a horrid human loathed by all women of earth. He would set his divine trap aiming it at the eyes of any woman before she even looked. He was happy with that. And on what seemed like a beautiful Sunday, he was bathing in the sun while his body crawled in the lake's sands. He could not break the prophecy when two eyes passed in front of him. He looked at his reflection in the clear lake water. The prophecy came entirely true. He took shelter in a little cave. He cried and wrote poems to the eyes that turned him into this aberration. Seven days later, he died. Yet, what he wrote remained until a traveler passed there ten thousand centuries later. The ink was still fresh, as if it was the continuation of tears on the cave's walls. The traveler testified all that he saw, and then, he and the cave both vanished.
The Entry
When I was born, clairvoyants chirruped in my father's ear: this God shall spawn humans. My father did not comprehend the prophecy. Clairvoyants did not either. But I, was given the power of magic. Women were my preys, and my brainchildren.
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To The Sky
To the first rain I embraced, not inferring my yearning to cry. To my burning before the great witness on the dawn. To a disappointment, hung by friends on their trees. To a chest broken open, flooding with emotion like an elongated season. I apologize for my visible being unified in the faraway color.
Dear Lord: Enlighten your sky so my apology could enter before creatures awake.
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Hello
I wanted to knock on your door
To drop a casual greeting, and leave
I would have, perhaps, talked to you a little
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Dear Lord,
Please, forgive their visions, and let them hear the vulture's apology to its prey, lest they think you made some, killers, and some, killed. Lay in their hearts a blue morning star, to show them the course of laughs in the wind of sea, adorn their dreams with the meaning of life, so they know that you are the creator of beauty, too. Sprinkle their roads with diamonds of your words, so they break the walls in their souls and fly to you washed like air in the rain.
Dear Lord,
At the beat of sins, in a valley only eminent from rapture by an illusion, I stand, naked of all hate, flooding with love. The honey of your grace drips over my body, and creatures smile. Like your power taught me, I forgive sinners in routs of ignorance and roads of knowledge. I look under my feet lest I block the way of ants. I look up at your sky to thank you for a star that embraced my heart with illumination, I kneel before you, for you taught me how to fill the chalice of love, and pour it in the grieving river, turning its stream into a rhythm, and its water, into a mother's touch on the head of a lonely orphan.
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At the gate of eternity, a friend carved a heart for his friend, as if he knew him.
He said: You did not need yourself to exit, and gift it to a girl aimed like an unseen shooting star.
He said: I withhold all my ships from all my seas to die, holding the language of two eyes stowing sadness like wine.
He said: As if she's a woman with a loom of terror for threads of wind, coiffing the unknown to sow it out of season.
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