New Poetry in Translation: ‘My Neck Against a Wall’

My Neck Against a Wall

By Huda Alwadia

Translated by the author

 

Dust

devours me,

embracing my breathless lungs,

reading the glint in my ambiguous eyes.

It takes a hook,

and weaves with it the alphabet of a wrinkled city.

Who am I before this illusion?

Who am I to the homeland?

 

You are the lover of the streets,

the barista of love and tea,

drawing in the hunger that

gnaws at my heart with its disfigured fangs,

until I am in shreds,

my hand left severed,

hanging above the clouds,

and my neck against a wall

that separates you from me.

 

 

In war,

we don’t know boredom.

We savor the taste of ruin with a loaf of bread

and stolen music.

I am a musician

whose instruments were burned—

I rebel against myself—

and play the hum of the drone,

its clamor

piercing the white tentcloth

and Fairuz’s voice.

 

So, I am hung

from the city’s dangling ropes.

Its streets coil around my throat,

teaching me the universe’s illusions.

I steal a child from myself

and draw

a small, roofed house

with a colorful balloon floating above it.

Beside it stands an orange tree,

and to its left a sun,

without dust,

like the streets.

I place my drawing in a blue basket

filled with postponed death.

 

My city sits in Iris’s palm

scratching out every text,

every painting,

every song

befriending my black dot

and moving on.

 عنقي على جدارٍ

Huda Alwadia is studying English literature at university. She is passionate about writing prose and poetry and serves as a creative writing instructor for children and youth at the Tamer Institute for Community Education.