You Are In The Village Then Poem by Ali Ahmad Said Esber

1.
When he leaves home carrying his axe, he is certain that the sun is waiting for him in the shade of an olive tree, or a willow, and that the moon that crosses the sky tonight over his house will take the road closest to his steps. It is not important to him where the wind goes.

2.
The blueness of the sky, the redness of fruit, the greenness of leaves: These are the colors that his hands spread on the page of day.
He is an artist who cares about his hands' work, not what the hands of art achieve, but the things inside things, and not as they appear, but how he describes them. And because he knows how to listen to things and how to speak to them, he lives on the margin of what people perceive. He believes that ‘the order that imprisons motion and interrupts the feasts of the imagination will only lead to collapse.'
And it collapses without theatrics or noise. He knows ‘that a bullet now replaces his plough,' but he also knows, with growing certainty, that ‘his plough will go further and that it will reach deeper than any bullet can.'

3.
When you see this farmer carrying his plough, you sense then that he is competing with it as if in a war. It proceeds ahead of him toward the weeds and thorns and he remains barefoot, following behind. The sound of the plough, as it tears at the thorns and soil, joins you, penetrates you, and it's lovely to hear it become loud like a trumpet with a deep raspy blow filling the sky.

4.
You are in the countryside then. It does not matter where you walk now, near the river or at the foot of a mountain, or a village lost among the rocks, where mud houses mix with cement cellars in a folkloric symphony that combines the tenth and the twentieth centuries. Let your eyes swim in all that's around them, forget the café and the street. Surrender like a leaf flying in the air, like the fuzz coating the branches, like pollen dust. Become a child. Only then will invisible creatures come toward you. Solitude filled with a treasure of hidden murmurs. Absence that instantly becomes a presence. Each tree is a person, each stone a sign.
There are herds of small animals that shine like distant stars, among grasses and plants. And there are stones that have heads and arms and that may walk behind you at night. There are small streams flitting among small trees that become beautiful maidens who appear to tired people heading to their houses before dawn, during the first hours of enchantment.

5.
The village is not a poet, as much as it is a painter. There is a remarkable ease to its touch as it draws the same picture every single day maintaining the same beauty. It is repetition that does not repeat the same motion, something like the waves of the sea, or like the desert renewed endlessly in sand, its only dress.
There is no uniqueness to this touch as if it comes from an absolute neutrality forever positioned at degree zero.

6.
You are in the village then?
I remember now what I almost forgot. To contradict the light in the village, one will end up choosing solitude, sitting on the other side of the mountain, or the square, or among the barefoot children and black goats.
And I remember now that we used to gaze at the stream covered with green grasses, hardly able to determine its course. We thought it was in pain, and moaning.
And I now know why we felt dried up in the memory of the stream.
And in the days now inscribed in the dust of the road leading to the stream, I also read what we knew and did not know to write:
Peace to the sun that always went ahead of us, without ever moving.

Translation: 2013, Khaled Mattawa