Venus Khoury-Ghata

The days remain in a bucket of water
The wells are kept for the use of the dead who splash the
walls with their silence
...

In those days I know now words declaimed the wind
besides pebbles, there were moons, but no lamps
the stars would emerge later from a brawl between two flintstones
...

we were lent a window on a fragment of the world
We we re the house and the road that led to the house
The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward
...

Where do words come from?
from what rubbing of sounds are they born
on what flint do they light their wicks
what winds brought them into our mouths
...

Calling trees and children to put their noises away in their pencil-cases
And come sit at the table with their backs to the fire where the bones of a
thousand-league old willow are burning
...

so my brother spoke the words of the arbutus
so the mother thickened her sauces with the ash tree's black resin
The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines
the young shoots leapt into our nights
...

the mother sent us out in the street naked
Walnut husks served us for ink
Fences we'd jumped were the pages we leafed through
Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms
...

The cloud hanging over the valley has been there forever
Trains come from the coast cross it without stopping
Gloomy travelers would photograph the cemetery but not the children, despite the
little bells they wore on their ankles
...

The first day after his death
she folded up her mirrors
put a slipcover on the spider web
then tied up the bed which was flapping its wings to take off
...

we filed the dead leaves by size to ease the task of the forest that was absent for
reasons known only to itself
The parents had left with the door
...

How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills
leaving us a body without contours
two packets of cold for the armpits
...

the mother looked like the linden tree in the square
like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces
like the log that didn't sweat or complain about the smoke
dead
...

his right shoulder lower than his left
heavy with rocky snowfalls from such endurance
It's his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands
...