Poetry Part I
Coffee and Water
A hundred times a day, he says,
“I’ll have to return. Here, there is no mercy.
There, there is kindness and warmth and …”
Then he falls silent.
I ask him, “There?
Where is that?”
He points somewhere.
His face is expressionless,
and he does not say anything anymore.
I take his hand.
We go to a café
and sit down at a quiet corner table.
I order coffee for him
and water for me.
I speak to him in Arabic
and mix water into the coffee.
He is annoyed, “Are you crazy?”
He tries to remove the water
from the coffee.
He tries to.
He tries to get the water back
into the water.
Caught in his Shadow
I walk behind him,
caught
in his shadow.
I do not try to escape,
as he would like me to.
I do not see
who comes the other way
and greets us.
Furtively, I step out
from the carpet of his shadow.
The sun burns me,
and I resume my place.
But now I have seen
what he has hidden,
what he, walking along with me,
has not mentioned
despite his many words.
He has prevented me
from recognizing my sun.
I rebel against
the coldness of his shadow,
against the darkness.
I step out into the sun.
I stay there
until he disappears
with his shadow.
I walk alone
with my shadow,
a loose shawl, in front of me.
I throw it
across my shoulders,
afraid
a passer-by might
step on it
and get caught in it.
I turn into a street
that is wide and open.
Here, nobody walks
behind somebody else.
The Bull
A bull does not go down
because the time of sacrifice has come,
does not go down
at the sight of the sharp knife in the temple,
the spears in the arena,
the threatening shine of the blades,
does not give in to the mercilessness,
the festivities, the din,
the rattle of the just slaughtered,
last night’s lunar eclipse,
the bloodthirsty dogs,
does not give in to …
not give in to …
A bull goes down
because it forgot
that the gods, after having been adored,
are slaughtered
in the end
and then
devoured.
The Emigration of Night from Day
Night emigrated from the cheerless city,
leaving it with the exhausted days.
It took its moon and its stars and left.
The city was happy about the light
and stayed awake for days.
When it grew tired, it did not find the night
in which it might have been able to rest.
Day emigrated from the exhausted city,
leaving it with nothing.
It took its sun and its noise and left.
It looked for darkness
wherever it came,
for darkness that divides time.
Day grew tired and did not know
how and when and where it should sleep.
Somewhere, in a place where time had got lost, a little child came upon a rusty key with a few signs: a Siwa fortune-teller’s prophecy:
In the beginning of time, night sneaked away at dusk to take a bath in the sea. It fell in and got caught. The prize which darkness demanded to set it free was that the sun should always proceed to the sea’s table when dusk fell.
Leaden Words
Imagine
that leaden words
fell upon a little girl,
happily asleep
in a garden.
Imagine
that her father scolded her
because she disappeared in a world of dreams
and did not listen to what he said.
Imagine
that the girl were heavy
and lugged her body
along,
cursing all the time.
Imagine
that the girl became a woman,
and, stooping,
had her gaze always turned to the ground.
Image
that there were tons of lead in her head,
forty long years,
and curses throughout her life,
curses cutting her down.
Imagine!
The Broken Shadow
I walked upright
until I approached
the walls
of the sleeping houses,
my shadow upright
next to me.
All of a sudden, it broke
on one of the walls.
And it remained broken,
even
when I had retraced my steps
from the walls.
Frightened and careful
I looked around.
Yet, my shadow remained broken
though the path did run straight now.
Munching in the Shadows
Naked
I step ashore,
wrapped in light.
…
I see the people
munching my clothes
in the shadows,
and they snicker.