The Redness of the Sun’s Trousers – A Painterly Poem by Abdallah Zriqa

The Redness of the Sun’s Trousers

Abdallah Zriqa

Oh, how can I see ?

While my eye is circumcised

Is this dirt?

Or stone for ablutions

What is this path extending from harem to heaven?

And this woman who has found nothing else but the back of a servant to peek out of a window

And behold a coffin,

these wasted taps coming from a rusty throat

The astrologers who couldn’t see this sky because prevented by flies

Nor the labyrinths that lead to a dog bite

But I didn’t know that between the East and the West

There was a veil

And a rosary of sins

How can your hand not turn into a whore?

while you paint every day

And what would it be like, when the canvas turns into a field

And your eye into a raven

And what would ” Monet”, “Renoir” and “Pissarro” have done

Had they not gone plein air

But then, what is the color of madness, if not yellow

What is the value of a line if it is not a blade?

have you seen this face that resembles a crumb of bread?

women looking like potatoes

And the sun unsuitable for any morning

What would Matisse have done had he not blown his wind

on red pants

What good would this collapsed chair be if it weren’t waiting for

Van Gogh to emerge from the void of a hospital

Or Ingres

Why does the body start from the back?

Or Degas

Who is dancing?

Is it life or this emptiness?

Or Michelangelo.

What a Renaissance if not that of the body

Was it even possible to discover America before discovering the folds

of the body

I forgot how I got into that worn out bar

Where Manet was with his tight, oil-stained pants

Bonnard there helping a woman take off her shirt

And Matisse there painting a leg with the blue of his eyes

And I didn’t see anyone else there

At the door I saw Modigliani trying to ride

the bicycle of a woman who inadvertently bowed down.

Translated into English by Pina Piccolo based on the Italian translation from the original Arabic by Sana Darghmouni.

Abdallah Zrika, contemporary Moroccan poet born in Casablanca in 1953. He writes in free style and uses colloquial language in his poems . His defense of freedom of expression cost him two years in prison in the ‘Years of Lead’ in Morocco. in addition to poetry, he also writes novels and plays for the theater. Most of his works are translated into French (La solitude des abattoirs du blanc, La colombe du texte) and some in English (Poems from The Insect of Infinity, translated by Tim DeMay).