Ghassan Zaqtan

In Jabal Najmeh, by the woods, the wizard will stop me
by a passage for boats with black masts
where the dead sit before dawn in black garments and straw masks,
a passage for the birds
where white fog swims and gates open in the brush
and where someone is talking down the slope
and bells are heard and the rustles of flapping wings

resemble the forest passing over the mountain and nicking the night!
… and peasants, fishermen and hunters, and awestruck soldiers, Moabite,

Assyrian, Kurd, Mamluk, Hebraic with claims
from Egypt, Egyptians on golden chariots, nations
from white islands, Persians with black turbans,
and idolater-philosophers bending the reeds
and Sufis seeking the root of ailment…
the flapping of wings drags the forest toward the edges of darkness!

In Jabal Najmeh, by the woods
where the absentee’s prayer spreads piety’s rugs
and the canyon is seen through to its limits,
the furrowed sea scent cautiously passes by
and the cracks are like a jinn’s harvest
and the monks’ pleas glisten
as I glimpse the ghosts of lepers sleeping on decrepit cypress
 
In Jabal Najmeh, by the woods,
I will hear a familiar old voice,
my father’s voice throwing dice toward me
 
Or Malek’s voice
as he tows a blond horse behind him in his elegy
 
Or the voice of Hussein Barghouthi
laid to rest beneath almond trees
as he instructed in the text
 
And my voice:
You’re not alone in the wilderness!

Don’t open the window

don’t wake up

I beg you don’t wake up …

they were dancing on the garden grass

as if they were the garden’s motive

or its meditation

and they were screaming there

Beneath the light

their dust was coming apart

it had rained at night

all night.

The enemy’s dead think mercilessly of me in their eternal sleep

while ghosts take to the stairs and house corners

the ghosts that I picked off the road and gathered like necklaces

from others’ necks and sins.

Sin goes to the neck… there I raise my ghosts, feed them

and they swim like black horses in my sleep.

With the energy of a dead person the last blues song rises

while I think of jealousy

the door is a slit open and breath enters through the cracks, the river’s

respiration, the drunks

and the woman who wakes to her past in the public garden

and when I fall asleep

I find a horse grazing grass

whenever I fall asleep

a horse comes to graze my dreams.

On my desk in Ramallah there are unfinished letters and photos of

old friends,

a poetry manuscript of a young man from Gaza, a sand hourglass,

and poem beginnings that flap like wings in my head.

I want to memorize you like that song in elementary school

the one I carry whole without errors

with my lisp and tilted head and dissonance

the little feet that stomp the concrete ground with fervor

the open hands that bang on the desks

All died in war, my friends and classmates…

and their little feet, their excited hands, remained

stomping the classroom floors, the dining tables and sidewalks,

The backs and shoulders of pedestrians…

Wherever I go

I hear them

I see them.