Translation by Bill Manhire

English version by Bill Manhire,
based on a literal translation from the Arabic by Reem Ghanayem

I heard myself call from deep in the well.
Th e wolf my brothers invented, he listened and fled.
It wasn’t my blood on the shirt, but still our father was blinded.
Was there a real well? A real shirt?
Was the desert a true place? Was the wolf himself actual?
What awaited me up on the earth’s surface
but the Prophets’ Road to Egypt?

In an ancient book
I found a court, a queen, a keep.
Suleika loved Yusuf and cut her fingers . . .
Oh, real blood that time; a real shirt, too.

I am searching for blood for my poem.
My fingers grow sharp as I write it.
I find Suleika in a refugee camp.
The hot iron she carries
burns and blisters her fingers.
On the wall, a photo of her dead brother;
I can see how her hands bleed as she does the dishes,
how her beauty is there in the rags she wears.

And now I am thinking of Marilyn Monroe.
She took her life because the world is made of pain
plus tiny scraps of love. She shone high on the screen
and a million men returned to their lives. Ah, they said,
is she quite stable? One day she will surely grow up
and acknowledge our worth!

I am just a little voice. Hafiz, Saadi, Rumi, Mutanabbi . . .
they sang beyond themselves, their embrace went wide.
Love held them up to the universe,
they listened to the stars. These days
poets are locked in their machines,
each one alone with a woman made of paper.
Ours is an age that drift s and slides, and we go with it;
we seek small things that never mattered,
find suicide and death in a world without worth.
Suleika waited for more than a crown, a king.
True divinity came from that well in the desert.
Yusuf, who survived the wolf, saw beyond the stars.
Suleika’s fingers flowered and flamed and touched the sky.

And you, what will you do, old fellow, old poet,
you whom no one has use for?
How long must Suleika wait?
Marilyn moves towards her grave.
Soon and in another place you will plunge
deep into the earth and thus beyond all purpose,
and no one there to lift you back to the surface.
Oh this is your date with no one.