By Fadi Azzam
Translated by Ghada Alatrash
*
On the underground
I sit and contemplate the ceiling.
London passes over me.
*
The roots of trees have not yet reached my train car.
The graveyards are raised above the tunnels.
*
From below
The city is peaceful.
*
The screeching of wheels against the winding steel rails
Resembles that ache of a heart in countries shattered by barrel bombs.
*
The doors open.
A clear, resolute voice
Penetrates the tunnels in my head:
<Mind the gap.>
*
I shift positions.
New passengers take their places in the car
Others leave.
Time and cars travel in a continuous stream.
The moment a car stops is the same moment
The passengers are moving.
*
Their faces are hollow
Stiff
As tree trunks.
Their gazes
Broken
Salty.
*
I taste the salt in my puckered mouth.
*
The one-line cosmic verse continues
Like a commandment from a Holy Book that has not yet been written:
<Mind the gap.>
*
A great deal awaits you in London.
Or so you think.
Moments of living or letting go
An experience waiting to be lived.
*
The place in which you live
Has nothing to do with the truth you carry.
An engagement ring
A withered rose in the buttonhole of a jacket
An idea
A memory.
*
I want to yell at the top of my lungs:
I came here
From there
From the great “Middle East”
To draw a map of a world without checkpoints.
I came from a burning land
To rise from my own ashes.
I came from the roots of history and
Its gaps
To dig up my own body.
I came from the great drought
Thirsty, like sand longing for water.
I came running away from my language
To continue to dream in it.
*
I came
Wanting to die
In search of a beginning.
To ask:
Now that we have died,
Why have we not yet arrived?
*
<Mind the gap.>
*
I receive a message from a Syrian poet
Who wanders in his sumptuous loneliness as he faces the world
And writes from the bottom of the gap itself:
“O the absence of those who returned.”[1]
*
I stare at the faces that haven’t yet fallen into the gap.
*
A face disintegrated by silence,
birds pecking away at its crumbs.
*
Faces burnt by ice
Scarred with gashes
Pitted by emptiness.
*
Faces so familiar
That they must be believed.
*
A clenched face
On the verge of vomiting out its bulging eyes.
*
A face ironed by the suns of Africa and wrinkled by the frost of Piccadilly Square.
*
An abandoned face, left behind by its owner.
A face loosened by an anaesthetizing London.
A sleepy face stuck between the end and the means.
A forgiving face,
Melting in tenderness,
Of a general in the army holding his child
His hands wet with the remains of blood that has not yet dried.
*
A face of a solider who lost an eye to the war.
Each time he sings
His eye returns.
*
A face chased by something ambiguous
Staring at nothing.
*
A face of an Irish poet who lost his beloved Belfast
Amidst the thick smoke of his pipe
As he exhales an old anger.
*
A leavened face
Waiting to be baked one morning.
*
A face faster than its owner
Its lips racing.
*
A face scared of me
And I,
F. A.,
Am terrified of it.
*
Feminine faces
Masculine
Gender-neutral
Crammed close to one another
Waiting at the mercy of the voice that returns
Clear
As Mozart’s rattle:
<Mind the gap.>
*
I stare at the map.
The train must have descended into the deepest depths of London.
The new station glistens with silence.
The warning voice ebbs
The passengers pour out and in
Leaving behind poems holding onto the ceiling straps.
*
A postmodern poem
Full of bills
And dating apps.
*
A pure poem
Lamenting its loneliness
Sterile
With no mention of breasts
Or streaming salty vulvas
And syphilitic penises.
*
A vernacular poem,
Like a mirror,
Recited by a rapper
Who spits on mirrors.
*
A poem that breaks taboos
Tells the untold
Written by a poet
Who lies naked
Fucked by metaphors.
*
A poem about love
That castrates love
And glorifies a cigarette
After masturbation.
*
A poem that boasts of victories,
Unable to attain an erection.
*
A poem full of questions
And exclamation marks
While the child blurts:
“The king is naked.”
*
A poem on Ecstasy
Written under the influence of plants and hangovers
About light and shadow
Resembling the calamities of Aldous Huxley.
*
The train stops.
*
Silence quivers
To the rhythm of Plath’s last breaths.
*
I close my eyes and the whole world dies.
I open them so that all is born again.
*
I mind the gap.
I climb the stairs
To the light at the end of the tunnel.
*
I release a breath imprisoned since birth.
The world begins to emerge
Little by little
Anew
Innocent as the moment of condemnation
Plain as life and death
Amazing as your kohl-lined eyes
Offering honey, coffee, and warmth on the ice of absence.
*
Behind me
The once-mighty voice
Wanes:
<Mind the gap.>
__
Note: All modifications to the original poem were made with the permission of the poet.
[1] Issa Idris
*
Fadi Azzam is a Syrian novelist and writer, and is the author of Sarmada (2011), longlisted for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, as well as Huddud’s House (2017), longlisted for the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He was the Culture and Arts Correspondent for Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. His opinion columns have appeared in the NY Times and a number of newspapers across the Middle East and Arab Gulf.
Ghada Alatrash, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She holds her PhD in Educational Research: Languages and Diversity from the Werklund School of Education, the University of Calgary, and a Master’s Degree is in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma. Her current research speaks to Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to oppression and dictatorship.
*
Also read:
An Excerpt from Fadi Azzam’s ‘Huddud’s House’
New Poetry in Translation: Fadi Azzam’s ‘If You Are Syrian These Days …’
Poetry in Translation: Fadi Azzam’s ‘This Is Damascus, You Sons of Bitches’
