That “home” is a catwalk between abysses – Three poems and paintings by Fawzi Karim

“No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.”

Wilfred Thesiger

 

  

ON THE HIGHEST PEAK

 

On the highest peak,

The deer edge towards my retreat,

Soliciting a blessing

From the cradle of my newborn pain.

 

The deer kneel then turn away.

The eagle will not risk a restless wind.

Empty are the clouds that frequent my retreat,

Presenting fronts darkened by anxiety.

 

Passing through the clouds I peer down on the city.

Its roofs are stacked with the nests of storks

While its palms are fans for its siesta,

Lending it shade and a breeze for the streets.

 

There are boats unmoored on its timeless rivers,

But ages of sand drift across well known features,

And now it’s clear that the city looks more like a corpse

Hovered over by wings which end in claws.

 

Ice forms on my coat and freezes me to my seat.

 

 

 

 

 

PARADISE OF FOOLS

 

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

There’s little point in wading against

The current of these tiresome days,

Keen to re-negotiate the swamp of our estrangement.

 

Little reason for the tide to be concerned

About the bones of drowning men,

Or for the sun to rise yet again on a ruin.

 

It makes no sense for prisoners of war

To barricade their dreams,

And though one returns from a battle-field

One knows it is only a matter of time.

And so, I do not dispute

That roaming is a fools’ paradise,

 

That “home” is a catwalk between abysses,

And he who puts out to sea

Seeking another shore may lose the coast.

 

 

FAUST IN CASABLANCA

 

A typically Arabic night
Peopled by ordeals in the form of ragged clothes,

Yellow phlegm that’s spluttered out by street lamps over asphalt.

I descend, through the tunnel of the Hotel de Paris,

And out of its darkness, emerge…onto Casablanca

To mess with a restless wave that keeps on catching me.

 

“If you were as young as me, man,

You could share my togs,

Stick out a foot to tackle mine,

Feint and dodge,

And run your rings around me.”
2

What’s left me of such joys but outspread wings

that bear me easily, bear me away…?

This Arabic eagle spending his summer

making up for a winter of lost time

Remains all folded into himself,

Sees a lowland sunrise without sun,

Contemplates a sunset which is an ashtray,

Chooses to avoid the Casablanca shore,

To serve his time in submarine bars among algae,

Always with a firebird’s aspiration for the poetry

that would stream like mint-leaves from his sleeves.

 

 

“If you were as young as me, man,

You could share my togs,

Stick out a foot to tackle mine,

Feint and dodge,

And run your rings around me.”

 

A Casablanca woman tastes my tears,

Sipping drops of dew wrung from my pained poetry,

And this makes her all the more thirsty.

She pulls my arm around her waist,

And braids my gathered mint-leaves into an anklet,

She dances, till Casablanca

dins with the applause of all the night-time drinkers:

A harlot of the night,

A hunger for the night.

And so I danced around a woman –

One who bewitched my verse

with her hot flesh that would heat no flesh

so much as it heated mine.

And so we embraced one another,

What delicious footprints on the sand:

Yet didn’t they lead to those nets that screw up fish,

To a soul lamenting the out-of-date body, the fleetingness

of it all,

And to a solo mysticism dreamt up by a mouse?

 

I sung alone in the port at night,

And ate alone in the port at noon, in its ear-splitting restaurant.

I came back drunk to the Hotel de Paris.

 

 

And my head was a handful of wind,

I ripped up the poems, and went hunting for source of my agonies:

“Am I the majnoon of a she, conjured up from the depths of sleep,

Or have I been a dead man since birth,

and this bitch but a garland of mint-leaves

woven over my tomb?

If I wreak havoc on the words, and scatter their damaged papers

All around the cell of this hotel-room,

Listen to temptation

And sign my contract with Satan,

Won’t this enable me to draw the woman to me

Simply by the power of my mind?”

…………..?

…………..?

Love but the sweat of fatigue on a forehead;

A beckoning bough that presages the slowest of dawns.

 

 

 

 

 

Fawzi Karim is an Iraqi poet, writer and painter, born in Baghdad 1945. He was educated at Baghdad University and worked after his graduation as a teacher for 9 months before embarking on a career as a freelance writer. He left Baghdad after the second coup by the Baath party and lived in Lebanon from 1969 till 1972. He has been living in London since 1978. He devoted his life to four fields: poetry, Literary criticism, painting and classical music. He writes in Arabic, his mother tongue, and very rarely in English. He translates his poems into English, and the English poet Anthony Howell reformulates them in consultation with the author. He devotes much of his time to classical music, listening and reading, and he regards it as the highest form of Art. It is the source of inspiration for his poems and his life.

He has many books on music (In Arabic): Music and philosophy, Music and mysticism (Forthcoming); Music and Poetry (2014); Music and painting (2014); Gods the Companion, a Musical life (2010); Musical virtues (2002);
He writes a monthly article on ‘Classical Music and the art of Listening’, published in ‘Al sharija’ magazine. 2
He has published more than twenty-three books of poetry, including: What The poetry is, but a Slip of The Tongue (2018); The Empty Quarter (2014); Night of Abel Alaa (2008); The Last Gypsies (2005); The Foundling Years (2003); Poems, Two volumes (2000); We do not inherit the Earth (1988);The Stumbling of the bird (1983);

He is also the author of sixteen books of prose, including: Who is Afraid of The Copper City, a novel (2018); The Thinking Heart, The Poetry Sings, But Thinks Too (2017); Poet of Maze and Poet of Banner, The Poetry and the Root of Hatred (2017); The Pastures of Cactus, short stories (2015); Gods the Companion, on music (2009); The deterioration of the 60s (2006); Diary of the End of a Nightmare (2005); Return to Gardenia (2004); The Emperor’s Clothes: On Poetry (2000)

His poetry is translated to many languages, including French: Non, l’exil ne m’embarrasse pas (Lanskine 2010); Continent de douleurs, (Edition Empreintes, (2002) Swedish: Epidemiernas Kontinent (2005); Italian:I Continenti Del Male (Collana Porta Maggiore, I Poeti 2014) English: Incomprehensible Lesson (Carcanet 2019); The Empty Quarter (Grey Suit Edition 2013); The Plague Lands and Other poems (Carcanet, 2011

He held several exhibitions in London and Italy. The next one will be in October 2018, in Cesena/ Italy with a poetry reading, as part of Orecchio di Dioniso poetry festival.

 

Paintings by Fawzi Karim.