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‘The South, The Last Day’: A Poem for Amal Khalil

The South, The Last Day

To Amal Khalil

By Abbas Beydoun

Translated by Yasmine Khayyat

 

The South could be the last land,

The last testament, perhaps the last sip

The last lira, the last medicine, the last day.

 

From its word

We can fashion a lament, a wreath, or even a prayer.

We can name it after ancient trees

Or turn it into a message, a museum

Even a dish, a dessert

 

The South

We could not place it at the center

Nor raise its mountains

That remained mere hills

Nor make its borders impregnable

Nor sell it as history or legend

 

It came from a single memory

Eternity needed no more than that

An eternity fulfilled in a day

A day whose twilight still lingers

Whose dawn still rises

Whose tears still flow

 

The villages are words without voices

Words inseparable from their grasses

Inseparable from their pastures

Where everything petrifies in the vast openness

In the soil that forms like a wild heart

A heart of dust

An incomplete beginning

 

The villages are words for the sleeping wilderness

Perhaps names for what churns within it

Pebbles rolling like camels and secrets

 

These faces may bear a gentle edge

Like hills that never grew tall

A beauty that never glimpsed itself

It stood bare without a breeze

completed in absence, in a quiet slipping away

 

As you enter with all this vista

Into the transcendent age, into the first hour

Where time alone is sovereign

And the sun has no end

 

Your smile never failed you

It adorned your face

another name, another home

 

You are the orphan of the mountain and of time

The orphan of your heart, the sky, your beauty

It was your adornment, your sign

With it, you greet ruin

And host the rubble

 

You arrived at the fold of yourself

Arrived with this tormented twilight

And offered your orphanhood to the house

That kept counting your sighs

Before closing in on you

 

Until your smile alone remained

A light from the last land

A single sip

The last day

 

الجنوب،اخر يوم

الى امال خليل
يمكن للجنوب ان يكون أخر بلد
اخر وصية وربما اخر جرعة
اخر ليرة اخر دواء،واخر يوم
يمكننا ان نصنع من كلمته
موالا او اكليلا وحتى دعاء
يمكننا ان نطلقها على اشجار دهرية
او نجعل منها رسالة او متحفا
و حتى اكلة اوحلوى
الجنوب
لم نستطع ان نجعله في الوسط
ان نرفع جباله
التي بقيت تلالا
ان نجعل حدوده حصينة
ان نبيعه تاريخا او اسطورة
لقد جاء من ذكرى واحدة
الابد لم يحتج الى اكثر منها
الابد الذي تحقق في يوم
يوم لا يزال شفقه
لا يزال فجره
لا يزال دمعه
طالعا
القرى كلمات لا اصوات لها
كلمات لا تنفصل عن اعشابها
لا تنفصل عن مراعيها
حيث كل شيء يتحجر في العراء الكبير
في التراب الذي يتكون كقلب بري
كقلب من غبار
كبداية ناقصة
القرى كلمات للوعر النائم
وربما اسماء لما يعتمل في داخله
حصى تتدور كالجمل والاسرار
يمكن لهذه الوجوه ان تكون لها رقة الحوافي
والتلال التي لم تكبر
هذا الجمال الذي لم ينظر الى نفسه
لقد تعرى دونما نسمة
تكامل في غيبة وانسلال
اذ تدخلين بكل هذا المطل
الى العصر الفائق، الى اول الساعة
حيث الوقت وحده سيد
ولا نهاية للشمس
لم تنقصك الابتسامة
كانت اما على وجهك
اسما أخر وبيتا
انت يتيمة الجبل والاوقات
يتيمة قلبك والسماء وحسنك
كانت ايضا حليتك وايتك
تمسين بها الخراب
وتستضيفين الركام
لقد وصلت طي نفسك
وصلت بهذا الشفق المعذب
واهديت يتمك للدار
التي بقيت تعد زفراتك
قبل ان تنغلق عليك
الى حين بقيت بسمتك وحدها
ضوء من أخر بلد
جرعة واحدة
اخر يوم

Abbas Beydoun is a Lebanese poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist. He has published 21 poetry collections and 7 novels. He was awarded the Mediterranean prize for poetry and the 2017 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his novel Autumn of Innocence. He has published many volumes of poetry, some of which have been translated into French, Italian, German, and English. His novel Tahlil damm (2002) was translated by Max Weiss and published as Blood Test (Syracuse University Press, 2008), winning the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Read more on his work at the LEILA website.

Yasmine Khayyat is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in 2012. Her research interests include wartime Arabic literature and cultural memory, Ecofiction and the encounter with oil, and human/nonhuman entanglements in fiction. Her first book, War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon ( Syracuse University Press, 2023), examines the figuration of the ruin as a site of protest and resistance in contemporary Lebanese cultural production. Khayyat’s publications have appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, Critical Inquiry, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and Human Organization, among others. Before joining AUB, she taught at Rutgers University (2013-2025). She resides in Beirut with her spouse, twin daughters, and their three cats: Mais al-Jabal, Minyas, and Violet.