‘A Time-Honoured Let-down / Called the Sky’

If you didn’t get the message from QISASUKHRA this morning with three new poems from Ahmed Nada, well, you should’ve:

Nada’s first collection, Shortly After Their Going or A While After They’re Gone (بعد ذهابهم بقليل), was published by Dar Kalima this summer. Nada is a 26-year-old dentist, and thus joins the roster of so many dentist- and physician-poets, short-story writers, and novelists (Hisham Bustani, Fady Joudah, Anton Chekhov, Ghazi Gheblawi, Nawal al-Saadawi, Maimonides, Yusuf Idris).

Nada has, according to Ahram Online, a great deal more unpublished material. Three of his unpublished poems appeared in English translation today; get them while they’re hot:

Once and again

One time

I lay on my back

And looked at a time-honoured let-down

Called the sky.

I did not know at the time

That it was a blend of steams, gases, dust,

Dust,

This everlasting drunkard

Hovering in the void

To delude us with beauty.

We are failed clumps of dust

Awaiting affection from other dust. Keep reading on QISASUKHRA.