Wadih Sa’adeh

We didn't disturb the drowsy winds,
we just walked away
accompanied by the salty dawn
and the howling of dogs.
We had left untouched islands there,
angels' coal in the vaults, God's broken trunks
and a bereaved eternity.
Oil spots on our clothes, walked with us,
and the fat of dreams.
Some of us carried in our hearts, broken carts,
and dead livestock.
The howling of the dogs stayed with us
until we disappeared
Under our feet, on the road,
we heard a strange
moaning.

Hi, you!
I have already arrived
like an unusual, exotic fruit.
Give me a cigarette.
I have amazing tales to tell
about kings, battles and urns;
about people found by chance by the wind,
and souls of fish
on the sands.
These are tales only for you.
Give me a cigarette.

I carry with me many hills I want to sell,
hills overlooking oceans
where whales are dancing
around those who have drowned;
overlooking bays were resorts could be built
for other enchanted lives.
Hills, hills,
pay whatever you like
and take everything.

We didn't awaken those who were sleeping
nor did we utter a word.
We only heard the last words of the doors
which were squeaking as we walked in or out.
We left pictures on the walls,
a scent of olives in the corner,
loads of tales spread out on tobacco racks
and your head, oh Riyadh,
aflame with falling stars.

We arrive incomplete on crutches,
in the streets.

Wherever we go
we leave a part of us behind.
Our eyes and feet remain there.
Thus, when we walk, the roads will not feel us.
If it rains, eyes will shed tears
somewhere else.
Give me a cigarette.
From the smoke, God will appear
with wealth, heaven, and splendour.
Shawki is my friend
but he will soon become a railway track.
Before this happens I would like
to smoke a cigarette with him.
All Sydney's lines pass through his head
in Sydenham,
and he is about to burst out - ‘give me a cigarette.'

Khodr, who threw away his gun in the mountains,
has become like a letter with no address.
He could be posted from one post office to another
but never reach his destination.
Out of smoke, the road appears and houses
with their owners.
Out of smoke, God is born.
Give me a cigarette.
When I return, I'll send you loads of tobacco from
our spreading racks,
and baskets of fruit and eggs
from hens we have fattened from the grains of our dreams;
they lay wealth, which I'll send you.
One day we invented veins for silence,
we would walk ahead, threading them into the path.
We walked in the harsh air, buckling the road
and we could see breasts trembling.
We could see beneath the bridge, the offal from
living creatures
and chunks of eyes search for their vision.
Listen ! We have seen life shivering beneath a tree
and we took off our shirts
to cover it.
We walked on with bare chests
and the air as our companion,
bringing us flowers
and playing with our hair.
It brought us a stare
lost by somebody
while watching daylight fade.

With us - bracelets. With us - streets. With us - shadows.
With us - air and reeds.
In our bags is the rustle of photographs, the
bandages of longing
and the sound of crutches stumping from mountain to
mountain.
We walked on.
In front of our door there was leaf from an almond tree.
We looked at it but kept on walking.
Anise, his eyes like two clouds over a grove
of orange trees,
the veins of his fingers
like dry pencils,
with grains of dreams
being pecked from his lips by a bird.
Ghassan played his lute all the way
until the streets became its notes.

We have nothing except
the smell of tobacco and olives
that we'd carried with us.
We walked ahead lightly
so we didn't disturb the dew.
We didn't bend a branch
nor waken the breeze.
We didn't say goodbye to our friend, we didn't
utter a word,
we simply
walked on.
...

Leaving their eyes behind while walking,
they rely upon past glances.
Silence is lying over their bodies,
with soft winds of the dead
and the spirit of devastated places.
If clouds drift into their minds,
it rains in distant fields.

They walk.
When they are weary,
they lay down their glances and sleep.
...

With what meagre space
remaining between his hands
he tried to reconstruct
a universe: with a tear,
he drew a star, a moon with a glance,
and with a single touch, a sun.
When he closed his eyes,
people commuted to their work
on the sidewalk of his eyelids.
...

This lake is not water. It was a person to whom I spoke at length, then he dissolved.
And I am not trying now to look at water, but rather I'm trying to recover a dissolved person. How do people become lakes like this, which tree-leaves and algae top?
Drop by drop, the dead descend on my door.
A boat stops for me under the sun.
And a wretched fit of trembling returns to sand.
I didn't shiver, but I went mad. The water is cold, but I didn't shiver.
I just trembled a little. Then I went mad.
On the surface of the lake is a leaf. It was an eye. On the bank was a bough, which was a human rib.
I try now to gather the leaves and boughs. I try to gather a person I loved.
But many have passed by here. They gathered leaves and firewood to kindle their hearths.
Gathering together a person will never happen. Gathering a complete set of limbs won't happen. Many of them were burned.
Nonetheless I must restore a person I loved. Loved ones must come back if you call them. They must come back even if they were water. If they were dead. If they were algae. Algae must become a human being when you summon it. And he will come, even if wet, if bloated, if rotten. It must come back a friend even if he died one thousand years ago.
There must be some way to gather people from the banks, a way to turn the
leaves and boughs floating on lakes into human beings.
I didn't shiver. The limbs shivered. I had to plug the space between their joints in order to stop their shivers so they would still.
But how very protracted is the distance between joints!

I run slowly like the last drop of water which came down, and was too late to flow.
I run slowly scrambling to catch up with the running, and evaporate by and by.
I won't make it. Part of me will come to be in space and part of me will sink into the earth.
I'm late for my comrades and won't make it. I creep on but I won't make it.
Pieces of me I lose, pieces accompany me exhausted, and pieces become free-floating particles.
Even if I make it, which thing of me will make it?

Around me is grass and pebbles and dirt. Birds peck at part of me. Ants eat part of me. And part of me belongs to the grass and pebbles and dirt.
I run slowly, and above me rises a thread of me, and below me descends a thread of me. I run slowly between two needles stitching my nothingness.
I came down the last drop. I was in the cloud and came down. Am I looking for a person who dissolved or am I the one dissolving? Or have I, from searching so much for his dissolution, dissolved like him?
And I've come, instead of searching for him, to search for me!
I see on the way people going by. Part of what remains of me sees people.
These, most likely, haven't lost a person they love. Or they lost him and despite that are completing the way?!
I don't know how our legs don't stop walking when we lose a person we love. Weren't we walking, not on our feet, but on his? Wasn't the whole excursion for his sake? Wasn't he the excursion?
How can one walk if he's lost a person? I stopped. He was the one walking and I his follower. I was the one walking in him. When he stopped, I no longer had feet.

I'm late, creeping, and I'm evaporating. How then will I bring back a person who has dissolved? Mustn't I, more precisely, bring back myself first? Come back at least as a whole drop of water coming down on a leaf, on an eye, on a rib, on a shore?
Mustn't I, in order to extract a person from algae, be at least of lake water?
I'm late and I won't make it. All that I can do is see. I see from far off. Distorted vision from the eye of a thing that is not cloud nor water nor solid nor vapor.
Then I don't see.
All of this is merely imagining. A glooming dark imploring glooming dark. I will not see and I won't make it and I won't restore a person and I won't bring him back . . .
I just am trying to creep along. I'm trying to catch up to my comrades.
But they've come to be far off, very far off.

Perhaps in the past I was a person searching for a person who had dissolved, or perhaps I was the one dissolving. Now not even a drop. And in my frightening identification between the water and vapor and the person, I search for a name with which to introduce myself when I meet up with the ants and grass and birds.
You are creeping like me. You will necessarily stop on a protrusion. Send me out a cry from there, and I'll name myself with it.
Identifying between water and solid and vapor. Even so I have joints!
And there are empty places between my joints.
Waters crash into them. Winds crash into them and people crash into them.
Many people now traverse my joints. I don't know whence they come or whither they go. But they crash against my bones.
People I encountered once; people I encountered many times; people I have never encountered . . . but they gush out now, and bang on my bones.
I must open these bones so they may enter.
If only these bones were a door.
From whence have they come?!
I think that those we look at enter our bodies via our eyes and become flesh and blood.
Some of them become some of those straying past between our joints
and we continue thus hearing the raps on our bones.

I now hear water knockings
I must open.
...

The exhausted people were sitting in the square
listening to the soft winds which may have been peddlers
or loiterers who had lost their way.

The exhausted people had their own open square
where the paving stones had taken on human qualities;
if one of the people was missing,
they cried out for him.

The exhausted people were in the open square
and their faces grew more brittle each day,
their hair, softer
in the evening's faint light.
When they glanced at one another, their eyes were brittle
until they thought of themselves as glass
and shattered.
...

Soon time will end.
Winds are approaching the immense wall.
And there they will buckle under.
They passed quickly, and the race is over.
Finally the winds will rest.
Time cracked open. It hangs only from one stitch.
I await its decline, its resounding fall to earth.
Life begins on the last day.
Days are many, but life is meagre.
It is delayed from day to day. And when there's only
one day left, it rushes into it with its entirety hoping
to live there . . . in this way life begins, just when it's
ending. That's why life will never be lived!
I've still one day left, what should I do?
Begin life? With what will I begin this life?
With whom? How? With what action or speech?
And if I happen to meet someone, what will I say to
him? With you, now, I will begin my life? And if I
said this, and he responded, how will I live a life I'm
saying goodbye to? How will I live the death of life?
I woke up very early. Those who will depart must
wake up very early to enhance their final days. They
must witness the dawn, at least, before they go.
In this room's space exist the splinters of humans
who lived thousands of years ago, whom I say
goodbye to, and become splinters like them.
I say goodbye to the pulse of planets that reaches me
across the vacuum of space from distant galaxies.
The galactic swishings, the dust of stars, the air born
a million years ago crossing silently an immense
space in order to reach me.
I say farewell to gasping volcanoes, to the drizzle of
far-away swamps, to the pictures, the chairs, the
mirrors, the clocks, my children's eyes, their shoes
scattered carelessly on the floor. I say goodbye to the
waves that penetrate my body, to the vibrations that
come from the oldest place, the big bang!
Did I have to clash with myself all this time, and
everything else with me, in order to become a silent
prey in the end? Wasn't I able, a long time ago, to
relieve this noisy world of one voice at least?
The universe must rest. Voices must all become
silent.
Oh, for some quiet!
I can't describe the day, I can't describe anything.
Speaking is nothing but betrayal. They don't speak
on the last day. They just shut up and leave.
Those hills were silent also. And we were, with the
stirring of sun and wind, the only sound.
But we, with that monotonous movement in the
stillness of death, had snared mysteries from the
bones.
How were we, simple as we are, flung between the
jaws of immensities, to invent places that would
protect us? How were we able to continue until today!
We were no mortals. But certain bones of cattle and
dry sticks saved our lives. It wasn't life that protected
us, but death.
We mixed our births with grass. And under those thin
ears of wheat our land found a shade. We never wore
clothes, or trinkets or bracelets. But our breath was
our cloth and ornament. We were naked. We found
warmth in the firewood born of our panting,
which was dry, and so ignitable.
Under the reign of flame, we had many celebrations
for which we selected many guest seats, within our
pores.
Life was within our skin, not outside. Thus, we lived
life in its secret hideout, in dimness, in the womb,
before it was born.
Our celebrations were tended in our veins, not in
public squares. Our habitation in the imagination of
place. Our caravans in the head, not on the roads . . .

We lived the anti-birth: there was our childhood, our
youth and old age. And we met life once, before the
door of death.

During the war, my father looked for a bone in the
wilderness to crush it with a stone and satisfy his hunger.
From those crushed bones a number of
children were born, among whom I was one. I was the
son of a crushed bone.

Inside the bone a tunnel opens now, where there is a
wilderness and annals, and where my father is
walking again.

He walks, taking me with him, hand in hand, looking
for a bone.

We walk in the heart of the bone, looking for it. When
we saw it at last, we were already far away.

We had become two bones, in which there was a
tunnel where people walked around looking for
bones.

I walked in the bone tunnel. My father had put me at
the invisible point in the folds, in the dusty emptiness,
the primal mother of the life of bones.

I turn my head back now and look: to those lost in
bone marrow, to the ones who stand on its pavements,
to those who stretch out their hands seeking an exit, to
the dead with the electricity of spirit, to those who look
for a stone to crush their bone and eat it, to the ones
who have just entered, and scarcely know what they
are doing.

I turn my head back and look: when I cast the
marrow out, I had opened my passage. Emptiness
was the way. Emptiness was the stone.

My child sleeps close to me. I will not say goodbye
to her. I shall go to death as if I were going out to
bring her some candy. I shall go to death as if going
to a shop.

I was a little boy when my father carried me in his
arms to a shop. He entered and said: This is my
son, give him some candy. All throughout that day,
I played with a handful of sweets.

But why do I reminisce over my childhood like
someone entering life when I'm actually leaving it?
And what's the use of recalling it when there is no
room even for a phantom? Whole populaces, even
those that are extinct, still reside here. I stare out of
the window hoping they would walk on my glance,
and get out. This room's arteries must rest!

Those who got out, left their splintered eyes on the
walls. Those who stay, hang up the sheep of their
breath and ate . . . I'll be the one to walk on my
glance through the window, and disappear.

Those days, which are gone now, were not more
than practice for entering life. Life is a mere practice
for entering it. But it ends there, and we never enter.
What we live of life is that practice. We live only the
pre-birth. In the arteries that are still unformed. In
the featureless face. Inside the entrails' ethereal
darkness. We live on the edge, between being and
nothingness. At the door. And when we attempt to
exit, we are shattered, like a heavenly body, in the
abyss.

So I'm not speaking about a life. I'm not describing
a birth, but its absence. I'm not writing about a light,
but a darkness. Not remembering what was, but
what was supposed to be . . . This supposition that
may finally be what we call our life.

. . . And saying farewell to it, perhaps, the only
certainty. A few more seconds and I shall have my
first certainty!

I will celebrate my veins. I will welcome those who
emerge suddenly from the void, and dance with
them.

Then I'll go back to the bone. To my father's secret.
To the tunnel. Cast aside the guts, smile and go on
my way.
...

Wasting time,
he sketched a vase.
He drew a flower in the vase.
Perfume rose from the paper.
He drew a jug.
Having sipped a little water,
he poured some over the flower.
He drew a room
with a bed,
then he slept.
When he awoke
he drew an ocean,
a fathomless ocean,
which swept him away.
...

He took two steps forward to touch
a tree he had planted the day before.
Blood flowed from his palm into the sap.
Leaves in his mind appeared on the branches.
When he tried to step backwards,
he remained where he was standing.
His feet had become roots.
...

They glided down towards the sea,
drifting from their mountains like soft shadows,
in case they woke the grass.
Passing over fields,
some shadows whispered farewell and slept;
others clung to rocks and stretched,
dragging the people back.
As they moved, exhausted,
towards the sea,
the sun above them was
searching for a needle
to stitch them once more, to their shadows.
...

They found him.
His outstretched hand was blue and flat
like space beneath a swallow's wing.
His mouth was slightly open
as though he wished
to sing.
...

He sketched his own face and saw
that it looked like someone else.
He added lines and shading,
zigzags,
open squares,
roads . . .
He ripped it to pieces
and disappeared.
...