Indifference

April, you exhaust me —
Your absence of scar
consigns the world to oblivion.
When everything organizes
its death — Oh, the wind,
punctual as drama
spills your rosy rain.
Enough now of your hue
of blood and perfunctory joy.
Be larger, as the sea.
Exceed your own cruelty.
Bees and birds keep dropping
dropping, still, their
unremembered losses.
No dew consoles them
upon this garden of rock.
Bloom — How well we knew
your name before. See,
how impotent is your art
here. We are all drowning
Equally —

 

Despite It All

I stepped out of the circle of time
and inside me was the bitter blue
of the earth, so blue that only
your blood rang redder.
The pulse of all things vanished,
cities, dawns violet,
hard little coins and escapeless battles,
only your touch remained.
More lucid was the pupil of loss
with its shards of salt, more vivid.
It was all beyond me, immortality
pierced the most troubled hours,
despite our tears and the incommunicability
that sent us back naked on the road,
despite the irrevocable choices,
despite it all. A certain stillness
rocked me, as if I coud never lose
you, as if I could never starve
in this black interval because
once, we had been that imperfect
earthly thing. Was the earth solid,
were there really dreams money could buy ?
I thought the earth was the bluest hell
I had ever seen, yet that your fire
was redder.

 

Dead Horse in Front Of Silwan

Up on the hills, I saw the sun rise red
then fall like a rusted bullet.
Nothing should die in this light,
into the illusion that war is an idea.
That dream won’t suffice here.
Your horse head, your beautiful dead head,
knows the fever of my race,
the joy of playing with weapons,
That race for whom a battlefield
is a paradise in bloom.
Since Carthage, blood polishes your flanks,
the memory of that caress suffices.
Stay longer, my splendid beast.
Poppies dance slightly above the ground,
like after a light glass of wine.
They perforate the mount of olives, warm
the stones, where will I bury your heat ?
My heart doesn’t beat in my chest anymore,
it lies under your hooves, hitting the land.
I found no alternative to beauty,
to rapture. No beats similar to
yours. We were lighter
and faster than rifles, our galops
more exciting than a hundred russian roulettes.
Now Jerusalem lies at our feet, and you
in that rhythm I cannot hold.
A certain slant of light rolls
your hair into silk, seems to say
that your wear your death well,
that out of this warm sack
you could grow some wings
but nothing happens, the camera
has lost its taste for fables.
Poor Pegasus, the sky burnt,
went back to its spark.
Your body lies bare against
a rock, and my heart,
like a berry, just beneath.

 

Cheval Mort devant Silwan

Sur les collines, j’ai vu le soleil se lever rouge
puis retomber comme une balle rouillée.
Rien ne devrait mourir sous cette lumière,
dans l’illusion que la guerre est une idée.
Ce rêve ici ne suffit pas.
Ta tête chevaline, ta jolie tête morte,
connaît la fièvre de ma race,
la joie de jouer avec les armes.
Cette race pour laquelle
un champ de bataille est un paradis en fleurs.
Le sang polit tes flancs depuis Carthage,
la mémoire de cette caresse suffit.
Reste encore, ma splendide bête.
Les coquelicots dansent doucement au dessus du sol,
comme après un léger verre de vin.
Ils perforent le mont des oliviers, réchauffent
les pierres, où vais-je enterrer ta chaleur ?
Mon coeur ne bat plus dans ma poitrine,
il est sous tes fers, frappant la terre.
Je n’ai pas trouvé d’alternative à la beauté,
à l’ivresse. Pas de battements semblables
aux tiens. Nous étions plus légers
et plus rapides que les fusils, nos galops
plus grisants que cent roulettes russes.
Maintenant Jérusalem gît à nos pieds, et toi,
dans ce rythme que je ne peux pas saisir.
Une certaine inclinaison de la lumière
roule tes crins dans la soie,
semblant dire que tu portes
bien ta mort, que de ce sac tiède
pourraient sortir des ailes, mais rien
ne se passe, la caméra
a perdu le goût des fables.
Pauvre Pégase, le ciel a fini de brûler,
il est retourné à son étincelle.
Ton corps repose nu
contre une pierre, et mon coeur
comme une baie, juste au-dessous.

Photographer : Didier Ben Loulou

Judith or The Book of Thirst

I – Water

My desire does not reside here.
It does not reside here and never will.
Over my head, I see black silent waters
bend homeward, brighter than silver.
I am the exact centre of a thirst
and all I need is a thirstier thirst.
This woman who meets me
in mirrors, who you alone truly
undressed – she is out of reach.
Her contours are translucent,
they go up in flames
like cellophane in the blind air.
Your hands are the only borders
I remember, they outline everything
I am and everything I ever was.
I am the line of red ocher
painted on your grave, curving
each letter of your name.

No touch alters your touch
no one seizes me.
When I walk down the streets
in widow’s weeds,
I’m like a color they can’t see
or don’t want to see spilled.
So they call it, simply, piety.
Ignoring black, of all severities,
is entirely made of light.
Like your absence by candles.
How much piety is there inside
a woman’s body when it sighs ?
Does it contains her spasms
when her thighs open to fate ?
I believe they don’t know what to do
with this certainty that the soul
cannot be sent without the flesh.
Each time you came, above
and below me, I vanished
into that one sound which claimed
my body was no longer here.

This is my letter to this azure
that never wrote to us.
The caress of fabrics, the birds,
rocks, dust and blood,
everything on earth, this place
of nonsense and wonder
is nothing but a fragile ritual.
Beasts recite and sing,
sometimes kneel, after days
of hunger, as in prayer,
hoping to be killed by thunder.
I go to bed holding the blue flame
of their breath, lessen the lights,
attend the dark, and offer
the joy we shared in this bed.
The warmth gone, the unborn child.
Piety, the word petrifies me.
Life knows nothing of scrutiny,
only the unceasing, wild liturgy
of the everyday, the repetitive
sacrifice. Death in blossoms,
hearing the wingbeat
of its own advent, lost in rose.
Defeated, one moment
by water.

I am, extend my thirst —

II- War

Corpses are more real
than clay, corpses
are an excess of Real.
Each one is the first one
the world has ever seen,
each one, as we touch it
makes our hand visible
for the very first time,
and the blood running
under our skin beat louder
than the rivers that outlive us.
The colour of the air, of dust,
of olive trees, these can be told,
but never the stone eye
surrendering its last hope.
It is summer and we’re still at war.
It is summer and children
fall like dry cloth in the streets.
Mute. Burning as August soil.
Strings of rain have ceased
lashing the roofs of the city,
our songs hang white
like feverish replicas
of the sun’s disk.
My sisters, my brothers,
look at them. Words leave
them. Mind leaves them.
The phlegm of the sky
astounds the earth.
And I — I who bore no child
stare by their side
at this abstruse vault
expecting no reply.
I, all silence — don’t
beleive in neutrality
only in the translucent canal
of my body.
Cyclamen will bloom
again out of their despair.
I will show them
waters limpid as solitude
issuing from heaven.

You, Bastard King
drunk with war, bathing your name
in gold like a sick God,
Oh None, Oh No One.
So greedy is your heart.
So arid it gives me a penchant
for violence and perfume.
I want — the words consume
themselves, I want —
lays your weakness down
at my door like meat
on a scale. This is what
you’re doing here. Nothing more.
Not hauling your war inside
the Holy City. Not pinning my sisters
to the ground like insects,
legs apart, to offer them
to an insane collector.
For I own an inmost weapon
against you and that head
of your army than privation.
Namely, your blood. Blood
is a caress of water but yours,
yours is a red disaster.
Men might escape from thirst
but from their own blood,
certainly never. Listen —
I am merciless as the moon.
I possess the red tides
of your pulse. Desire beats
loud beneath your skin,
echoing, echoing, like
the shock of ruin.
How you cry after it,
how it violates your will.
This is what you’re doing here.
Nothing more. Not sacking
the One City, not laying down
its Sanctuary.
I am shameless as the sea,
that twirls, that kills.
If I forget the blue roots
of my bones, if I don’ t set them
above my highest joy,
then, let my tongue cleave
to the roof of my mouth.

III – Psalm Of Spasms

Sing, err and Sing —
My people do not march,
they wander. It’s not
a variation of cadence,
rather of kind. Psalms
in their throats never
tarry, they walk against
armies like they waltz.
This is the story of our captivity,
the endless exodus,
the permanent exile.
It flows like an inverted river
running to its source,
inserting here a sign
there building a sigh.
On that Vertical Bridge
I go dressed in red,
wearing the brutal jewels of war.
The world stands negative
beneath my feet
on the perished plans
of Peace — I know
that War and World
will only stop together.
I’ve seen so many birds
in the Divided City
broken, piled as hours,
songs kept coming out
of their chests.
Long gone —
like the wings of angels,
yet clear, eternally beating,
they soar, they say —
Doves, cold is the night,
come shine as snakes.

There’s a word sharp
as a star, precise as the soul,
that turns to a cruel joke
once applied to the body.
Inviolable is the word.
It lies broken in the eyes
of the old wrecks, defined
by fates they could not change.
Life is shameful and the Law
comfortless as salt.
There is no need for more
knowledge. But a blue dew
inhabits the innumerable
atoms of my flesh, seals
the splinters into one.
The Lost Pleiad
has seen that core,
my strangeness, evaporate,
and reach the horizon
where there is a long bar of pure light
where everything is very settled
very still, very pure.
That core cannot be touched.
If I bathe my songs in sex,
touching my enemy’s lips,
altering his breath,
it stays awfully intact, colorful.
It is the one flamboyant recluse,
not me — who owns a name.
This is what the splendor
of the sky has come down to.
There is no other
correspondent hue.

Love, the earth suddenly turns,
turns red. My heart splits
under the vermilion eye
of daybreak. I am offering
myself, offering that land
to hope. I waded life,
whole pools of it, hot
and carmine. Nobody saw me,
stopped me, condemned me.
Blood burst free
from my enemy’s head
splashing my naked skin
like a river of fire.
But I have no song
for the touch, the smell
the spectacle of death.
Death bores me,
I never wanted it.
I want the sons of Israel,
daughters and sons, grandchildren
nobody yet knows
to pause in pleasure.
Their hearts like pomegranates,
all of them, loving the sun.
Yet, I know there is a name
they will all go mad for,
when everything that can fall
will have fallen, when oceans
will all rust ruby red.
I would like to write
that name without pain.
I would like to utter it
without shame — Jerusalem.
Your name comes toward me,
a vision on the retina
of water. Every single letter
like an arrow — blue,
ascending and descending
in rain or dew.
I stand up and watch my hand
trace the one unique
circle of your unbrokenness.
The heart full of summer wine,
not inclined to clot.
There is no endpoint.
Love, like water
is hard to stop.

In Name of Time Lost

I thought life came again
straight from a blank —
the breathing, unfeigned
the pulse, of porcelain,
just as the sea comes
from the moon —
miraculous and plain.
Time turned to a shiver
my heart — to bread,
its pulp soaked in milk,
melting as in prayer.
Deep in the blue ahead
flared the incision of a wing.
But the instant receded
chased by an old joke
a cliché — the ocean,
barely rustling,
was served in a cup.
That spoonful of light
eclipsed the vaster moon,
a crumb of madeleine
idly sinking, woke me up —
The sky was silent,
all grey, like Combray.
Everything ironed flat,
everything commonplace.
Waves couldn’t break
neither shells, quiet
as cakes. Songless
birds died of satiety
in their cages.
Yet the echo
of Thunder — gone
— itself consoled,
in a rumble of pearl
my Eastern soul.

 

The Ghost Orchid

The past is such a curious beast.
It has the lightness of things gone
and weighs roots down
with precious care.
Lets you hold your lover’s fate
between your hands,
but in its changelessness —
you are lost. You dream of
desert flowers blooming
once a year, and wonder
if the next will be wider, whiter,
impatient of your touch.
You dream of a ghost orchid
that lives suspended in midair,
receives the grace of darkness
and a sweet scent of apple.
It opens at night like a paper-star
and perishes, untied,
with the morning sun.
It is so rare it gives you fever,
each petal a wing, a blade,
a flame, everything to be,
to be — and no past to beat.
Its pale skin offers itself
with a confidential moan,
moonrays caught
in the sudden web
of its roots,
but your brain in that flash
is the weight of a shadow —
you go away
jealous of its promise
just before it shows.