“Few are those who care to wear formal clothes at funerals that arouse pity.”
Just yesterday, I received a notice
from the cemetery administration
that my corpse had gone missing.
Also yesterday,
the national newspapers announced
that the televised broadcast would run
for two hours every night,
and be repeated again
at ten in the morning,
and that the stove’s ration of firewood
did not count as breakfast
for every hungry person!
To forestall the margin of error
liable to arise
in most graveyards the world over,
they gave me two days’ grace
to return the corpse
to the hydrogen preservation bag.
I swear
by the imprint of my eye,
by the squandered wick of the niche-lamp in its oil basin,
by a newborn cautiously falling
into the bleeding mire of his motherhood,
that I will return to the cemetery before the night is done
lest I lose my place on the list of the buried!
Considering that I live alone with a table
that neither shoos nor swats.
My poor table:
it becomes my crutch when I try to stand,
and a little pillow behind my head,
when I sleep.
Only this table
in a woman’s reflection
on the soot-blackened wall,
has pubic hair—long-stemmed grass
beguiling me to plunge into it,
my little head first
and bathe!
The table tells me:
“We have plenty of time
for each of us to read the other’s body
for each to understand
the map of the other’s mind.”
And I reply:
“Don’t you know I have no strength
to live with you;
nothing is gained by your oppression,
by dangling your legs over my brow,
lest the devil show you my weaknesses,
and in the end, I leap with you
from the window to my death!”
I tell her, the one born of the hot
sheet metal of my body:
“If life is to carry us forward,
you must remain unfurled
at a bow’s distance,
at a spear’s distance,
as far as the wind’s ammunition,
wearing a face of lace.”
I wish I could tie that lace by
its short sleeves
and weave it into the web of my veins:
together
two braids on a seagull’s wing
a childlike dance freed into space.
My eyes hurt—
so very often, my eyes hurt
upon reading all this sorrow,
which erases the yellow freckles
beneath your eyelids:
pale-white, stringent,
promising saltiness
and sweetness at once.
I promise you
I’ll be patient
until the scene has restored
your complete image
on stage.
I have no endeavour
in this age of modernity
and post-modernity
but to love you.
I love your lazy children
as they crawl
along your pavement
busy with the idle
and the bed hoppers.
Ever since my heart’s first weaning,
I have had no homeland as vast as you.
The city is stifling in its first spring,
its seventy-third winter,
its sixty-seventh fall,
and its galvanized fragments
of empty graves.
Would you like a glass of water?
I’ll leave a door open for you
in the glacial wall of my manhood
and go to sleep.
Would you like a room of your own?
I will learn how to open
two windows in my head:
One overlooks the city,
where your passion bears its cross.
The other overlooks your
recovery or mine.
I will certainly open them two times.
I booked two seats
at the ticket window.
I will be under the balcony
when it falls on my head,
while I play the role of rescuer to a girl
in the ninetieth year of her miserable life,
who still has her chastity intact.
When I’m beside you,
I need to squander your voice
across the barren wilderness.
Perhaps the ewes will be enchanted
by the chant of your clear sorrow
and return burdened
with mourners at the eastern horizons
and grieving women
at the crossroads of invaders.
You will love chivalrous men,
born wrecked
from below their navels
to their parched throats.
Not one of them has ever written a poem
or written to a woman,
skilled at snooping on midnight customers.
ensnaring those whose bitter bile has festered
over cooking programmes—
or they might have seasickness
travelling aboard fishing boats
and die like pirates
without a pension!
Will she believe me when I tell her:
Luck has never brought me
a companion like myself,
sick with the perils of solitude,
resentful, like me,
handed-down to streets and alleys?
Death has no choice—
as he rides his motorcycle
speeding through the streets of time,
snatching our lives,
as they hang from the wombs of balconies,
with him
a poem by a modernist poet,
which was found raw in an old flowerpot—
but to pass my grave, unmoved by a cactus stalk
erect in its stubborn misery.
Death asks her,
having won its first battle:
Are you willing to come with me now,
and with no more excuses?
I can no longer trust the bedsheets
while she sits at the kitchen table;
the knives at play, hiding and seeking,
while the boys dance with winged wolves.
I never knew when it was
that I awoke
to a woman’s voice whispering in my ear:
The long-necked gravedigger is
knocking at the door,
here to take you back to the cemetery;
they’ve been asking him about a body gone missing!
جثة قادرة على إثارة المرح
محمد حسني عليوة
Shirin Abedinirad, Dilemma, 2022, Land art, Tehran, Iran. Drawing on Rumi’s luminous line — “Beyond right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there” — the work transforms a staircase of mirrors into a threshold between earth and sky, light and shadow, illusion and revelation. Half-buried and half-ascending, the mirrored steps invite viewers into a meditation on duality, transcendence, and the soul’s quiet dialogue with the infinite. Artwork courtesy of featured artist Shirin Abedinirad.
