1

Like an absence that fetters the drown and spread them at the end of the statement

like poisoned gardens that tremble before the desert,

like bells that fades in a deaf day,

like this and that

I point with amputated fingers to my solitude.

 

2

I am:

An artifice that closes in a yellow book summarized in “who are you?”

Blackness towards no one progresses against me.

An empty heritage opens into a crowd that listens to false reeds.

A slave who kneels- at the end of the people- on his knees and asks his question;

(which is- in the end- my own):

Does the absence speak?

He said:

And the solitude, too.

It orders and forbids.

And the order and forbidding are speech.

I said:

This is a speech that I cannot talk among people.

He said,

while pointing to his chest:

Doesn’t people but me?

 

3

Like a vast silence that spreads its sick trumpets,

in drowsy ears,

I guard my solitude.

 

4

I am:

A stolen sheet greening on the rope of slander.

A village of the blind leads the South to a harsh wait.

A defeated spring in defeated books;

its face is corrupted,

and will be corrupted even when he makes his solitude have command of himself,

so that the variant selves are flocking to know him.

He will be hitting at his fickle aim;

Trembling.

(In fact it is his father’s beliefs that are trembling inside him).

Wet,

he ascends,

with his chained and tears,

to his father’s room.

There,

before an oil heater,

before an open Quran on a forged sura;

he weeps:

Father,

my beliefs pain me.

 

5

(My beliefs pain me).

He says it while feeling a certain part in his body.

He says it and means:

Where am I going to spend my delay from school?

Or where am I going to complete my absence?

In Radwa or thi Tuwa?

Or to whom I will disclose this eternity pouring knowledge in the carafes of ashes?