Translation by Khaled Mattawa

English translation from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

In the afternoon, I conjured my night in your name, and listened to
the Great Bear dictate his verses to earth’s blood flow,
and to the cities, sealed with the wax of laws, recite their scrolls
to people made of wounds and bread who roam
asking the streets: Where did we come from?
Where do we go? And now
The moon of the East resumes its rituals.

Is it time, dear spring of my freedom?
I’ll go on walking.
Is the East veering away from the West, offering its heavens
to another moon?
I’ll go on walking.
Everything is allowed –
The soul is nothing but sperm that appears in two guises:
One image depicts time with the ink of its temptations.
Another apprehends space.

The West is behind you, but the East is not before me.
They are two banks of one river.
One has become more than an abyss,
more than a rock;
Sisyphus is its voice screaming:
Sinbad wanders the sea of his Islam,
Gilgamesh is dead, and Ulysses is lost among his waves.

One body is ripped limb by limb:
A body that has no East except its name,
A body that has no West except its name.

I no longer multiply like you. I live in solitude whose elixir I inhale and
whose alembics I beseech.
Unlike you, I can no longer distinguish: Who is Cain?
Who is Abel? No, my steps do not see
through the forest of the universe what flashes there,

what lights its distances
and renews its magnitude.
Do you think the beginning of the East is West?
Do you think the end of the West is East?

This is how I open words to reveal the wound of creation, to witness
its enormity.
I see it invade me
and I see how it overruns the shores of my love,
how it lures the sails
toward the ends of the waves, West and East, to the ends of darkness,
to what it names as myself,
to what confirms that I am allied with it, against myself.

Myths in the West and East are wounded.
I am only blood
dripping from them.