The Lost “Utopia”

... “Utopia” is the lost dream in the imagination of the poets, the paradise in whose soft shadows the yearning souls live, drinking of its dews and its shades and its lights, and never quenched...

Utopia is a distant longing... a land without borders and without barriers... It is the depth, and the height, in man; the eagerness and the yearning in the heart. It is the thirst, and it is the spring.

... And in the poem of the profound poetess “Nazik al-Mala'ika,” which “The Woman's Voice” presents to its readers, the poetess gives voice to these deep feelings that live in the mind of poetry, with much beauty and much radiance.

“The Editors”

A lost echo, like a far-off mirage,
tugs at my soul morning and evening.
I sleep to its eternal refrain,
and the glitter of song awakens me.
An echo no echo has ever resembled,
sung by a lyre in the hidden dark.
When I hear it, my life lies sleepless
with longing, calling to it a thousand calls.
Upon its refrain every wound in my heart
dies away, and every hope shines forth,
and my senses close their eyes in a rapture
drugged by the dream of Utopia.

And Utopia is a dream in my blood;
I have imagined it a land made of fragrance.
There, across a distant space,
the light dies down and is never made real;
there, where all fetters melt away,
and where the eyes of life lie sleeping.

And Utopia — where the light endures,
and where the fragrance of the violets remains,
and where life overflows as nectar,
and where the bounds of time are lost:
there, life is youth prolonged;
there, spring remains forever spring.

There, where Scheherazade called,
and where Diana drives the light along,
there is Utopia, in the mist;
an eternity of perfumes dries upon it,
and it lies in an intoxication without limit
on a shore like the light of the stars.

There I wandered one evening —
I feel its footsteps on the sand, and yet —
and I felt in my body a life;
before me lay a strange passage,
and along its two sides stretched a gulf,
and in my dream I cried out: where am I going?

I die and live upon its memory,
upon a horizon whose secret bewilders me;
the planets melt away in its magic.
What is its color? What the scent of its flowers?
And thought breaks loose from its captivity —
there Utopia stretches away.

And the sun neither sets nor sinks into darkness
alive, nor does the narcissus wither;
radiant, nor are the cups ever emptied;
and where the planets never drowse,
souls sink deep into its rapture,
shading the stillness of Utopia.

Tales the young palm-shoot sang,
and Narcissus worshiping his shadow in the sun,
upon a twilight whose like no eye has seen,
granting her a thousand melodies and a kiss,
to the refrain of a fading song —
I call it the shore of Utopia.

And with me was a form like a mirage;
I could see nothing — only some cloud —
carrying my soul in flight above the dust,
wrapped round in surges of fog,
and a few islands belonging to a few hills;
and an echo replied: near Utopia.

And in another dream I was walking,
strange, strange, the color of ether;
it came to an end beneath my weary feet,
climbed by a hope that was fading away.
I stood at her feet, lamenting,
and asked what might be seen beyond her.

And in a third dream I fancied myself
gazing in a rapture without limit —
do I truly see the gate? Its panels —
I came forward trembling, in awe;
I knock upon the gate in rapture,
and I cried in a strangled voice: let me in!

And my life has passed, passed in vain;
in vain have I crossed the deserts of existence,
and still I pace the silence of the wastes;
the waiting weighs long upon my heart;
I try to console myself with something —
minutes... then I despair, and I cry out:

I shall stay on, tugged this way and that by wishes,
and dream and dream and never wake,
kissing her walls in imagination,
asking the spilling perfumes for news of her,
asking until the question itself dies;
and when I die, I die with my heart

on a shore of pebbles and sand
where a horizon dries up like a phantom,
by a rock rooted fast, immovable —
for even the shadows may slip and fall —
over a wretched dream never to be won;
and the sand said to me: Utopia.

At her great gate of marble
I almost go mad... I almost fly!
It looms, lined with silk,
and in my eyes the gleam of a serene dream —
and no answer but the bitter stillness:
I die at the gate of Utopia.

And nothing puts out the fire of longing;
in vain have I dragged the chains of the years,
asking the passersby about her secret,
drowning in a sea of sorrowful despair —
in a wood... in a valley... in the shade of a fig tree —
nothing is like Utopia.

Toward the everlasting, far-off horizon —
only to dream a new dream,
and ask the wide-stretched space for news of her,
and the drops of dew, and the drifts of ice,
upon my lips — and the anthem dies down
upon a tryst with Utopia.