Divorces

Oh, you shreds of life
in every barren land,
oh, shreds of youth
or of the fruitful spring,
O thousand wandering dreams,
O thousand wasted longings,
O thousand darkened roads,
broken off and barred,
O thousand thousand poems
I ended at the opening line,
O thousand loves cut short
that laid waste a destitute heart,
O all that I have shared
with my pillow or my bed,
O all that I bade farewell
long ago, never to come back,
O all who left remnants behind
in my blood or in my tears,
O sentinel of every trade,
by haggler or by seller,
O every one for whom I tied
a thread to my heart and my ribs —
I have divorced all that is scattered,
strewn about and broken.

★

Ah, hours of time,
I have shaken off all my scruples.
You are no measure for my life,
that it be measured out in cubits.
I have locked the doors of hope,
of my eagerness, my aspiring;
nothing beguiles my eye,
nothing fills my hearing.
I have divorced every sweetness
that beguiles, and every pleasure;
I have divorced all that fetters my heart
beyond any return,
and shaken it free of every care
that crouches and sits heavy,
and of every dumb love,
stumbling and timid.

★

How cruel is the cutting of threads,
the delight of the one in pain;
yet I have cut them through
and grown drunk above my grieving.

★

The beauties of existence have shrunk,
for all their masking;
however her bosom billows
with bravado and coyness,
never tomorrow shall she find
a chord in my heart to claim.

★

I have divorced — how sweet is divorce!
And there is no way back.
My house's thresholds I have set far
from me, and farther still my chamber.
O night, is there some track,
remote, refusing all,
never trodden by breezes
or by any shaking wind,
or by the ringing of the spheres of space,
unceasing, hurrying on?
O night, this is a step
your expanses have come to claim,
for I have hoped to walk —
and of nothing but my walking am I aware!

Baskinta — Jareer Abu-Haidar