Divorces
Jareer Abu-Haidar
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
Hymns of the Valleys
For the first time
there appears, by Ameen Rihani,
the father of prose poetry in Arabic literature,
his collection of prose poems
"Hymns of the Valleys"
Ask for it at all bookstores
and from
the Rihani House for Printing and Publishing
Bab Idriss — Beirut
Telephone 28757
34