I guarded my theft like a relic – Four poems from “Noura” by Asmae Dachan

To my sister Noura (Aleppo, 28 October 1975 – Ancona, 30 October 2014)

Guardian of memory

I appointed my insomnia

guardian of your memory.

I asked my loneliness

to accompany your shadow

and my silences to articulate time,

time that separates your eyes

from my glance, your smile

from my stony face,

your hands from my embrace.

I wrote your name among the leaves

and the wind blew it away,

I painted your face among the clouds

and my rain dissolved it

into rivulets of yearning.

Among flowers I looked for the most beautiful

and I found you in the flight of a butterfly.

I whispered your name to the waves

and the waves composed an ode,

and the ode rocked the moon

and her melancholy in the night.

I stroked your white gravestone and I heard

a breath of life takes wing among the cypress.

 

A handful of earth

 

I stole, for my severed roots,

a handful of earth.

With my hands I picked

the red that tells its story

and with my glance I stroked

the grassy  carpet I had never trampled.

I bowed to kiss her wounds

and breathe its glory

and find myself.  I, unknown to myself.

I guarded my theft

like a relic

and now the relic

embraces a land foreign to you

you who saw the first rays of the sun in Aleppo,

and closed your eyes in a faraway land,

in a city where I have no blood,

but I write my history.

I gifted you with my theft, my relic,

so that you may sleep caressed by a veil

that is neither that of a bride or of the faithful

but a veil of memory and identity.

Now on that hill

merging like two sisters

are the land of Syria and the land of Italy,

embracing you forever.

 

The name of rain

I am looking for a name

for the fragrance

of the first rain

an ephemeral moment

fragment of eternity.

 

 

My  first memory

 

From behind the window where I was standing

I lifted my eyes to the sky

and saw white clods floating by

and birds getting drunk on freedom.

I heard the wind singing

a tune I didn’t know

and I trembled out of a sweet fear

dressed as the unknown.The world, outside, was flying

and I wondered where it would stop

and how we would return home.

My punishment was to stay there by myself

to learn that you are not supposed to write on walls

but you, an accomplice in that passion,

looked up to give me your smile.

The first thing  in life I recall.

 

Asmae Dachan is a writer, blogger (Diario di Siria) and an award winning journalist, born in Italia of Syrian descent. Editor in chief until 2015 of the Italian journal Mondo Lavoro, she writes about human rights, the Syrian conflict, the refugee crisis and the anti -Assad  resistance for major national Italian magazines and newspapers. An award winning novelist, she published Dal quaderno blu in 2009, 2 collections of poetry, Noura and Tu, Siria (co-authored with Yara al Zatr). Her latest novel, published in 2017 and set between Syria and Italy is  called Il silenzio del mare.