Translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham
Cover art: Olga Morozova, “Paradise. Song 30” 2022, courtesy of Ukrainian painters’ exhibit in Padua
To the Drowned Paul Celan
As if it is happening now
That river in whose head you spin
Remembers you
Until now
It remembers
Your lined forehead
Your eyes staring
Into unknown spaces
Your hand furrowed
By a scalpel and your terrifying jump
On that crazy morning
Celan everything was real
In that obscure event
Your waterproof shoes
Your last cigarette
The Mirabeau bridge
The distant whistles of the steamboats
Your shadow that always wanted you to look different
The dreams that left you imagining how the final scene would be
And this sky with its seven layers
Why didn’t you think about things for longer?
Was the world so terrifying?
What are you doing to tell the world about the magnetic river mud
A garden settled in the face of nature
Or roots of a river squeezed between two banks
Celan
The sun was present at the farewell ceremony
And the eager water applauded
With great enthusiasm
Your overwhelming presence
The German-speaking Jew
The comrade tormented in concentration camps
Celan
We miss you
We who don’t read much
We who press on these fingers
So they say something
We who rely on chance
To find ourselves
We who are trying to make you a promise
***
The Ninth Bomb
Just like that with no prior warning
The ninth bomb will explode
In this unassuming street
It will explode from extreme depression
As a possible cause or the only cause
And the clouds close to the incident
Will be transformed
Into cold body parts
And the dreams that wake up at four in the morning will die
And the strings of the violin played by the wind will be severed
Passersby will piss in their pants
And the demand for blood for rare groups in particular will rise
Quadratic equations will change
When the speed of flight from death
Is measured in hertz
Trees will lie flat on the ground
And never rise again
The Security Council will hold
A session of denunciation and condemnation or perhaps not
As some god will declare a period of mourning
For three days
That CO2-breathing bomb will explode
As best it can
In a moment of madness hitting the detonator linked to the TNT charge
Concussion is something like that
It will explode with its four major arteries
With its vocal chords
Explode in a manner displaying much art and much death
Like destiny
Destroying itself in its final sunset
Memories of a Retired Man
He was the godfather of the dogs who remember the Vietnam War
He fought with ducks descended from the white race
And cut a tunnel through the armpit of the Andes
He was a party man of little commitment or so it was said
Speaking with affection of Napoleon and playboy poets
And controlling the nerves of fire that blaze from the land of the Greeks
He was
A Jesuit in Texas and a Marxist in Addis Ababa
Who breathed in the smoke of molten asphalt and worse
And led the militias that flourished in the South
And demonstrated in public squares where immortal statues fell
He was vigilant on the battlefield
He demolished a communist statue in Mariupol
And sharpened knives on the arm of crazy thunder
And kneaded the wind that blows from the four quarters of the world
And shaved the beards of flowers that guess zero hour
He was there running away from some god or other
Testing the worth of poetic bombshells
He was everything
He was the solution and the hell
Managing his life
With the mentality of tyres that scorn the depth of the abyss.
Maturity
You’ll grow up with some kind of shock I think
Or almost
In a world that doesn’t accept the other
And you’ll realise
How spurious laws are when they’re put to the test
How deep the darkness when you’re lost in bamboo forests
You’ll grow up at the mercy of lost days
To write thank you letters
And letters of apology and suicide notes
To consume songs that fail to eradicate the pain connected with illusions
To waste your life striving to prove something
To receive bruises that destroy your last hopes
To collapse like the Berlin Wall
You’ll grow after each bout of failure
And fate may lead you
To work
A groom for the horses on the masters’ farms
Or an acrobat showing his creative madness in the circus
You may enlist to fight for nothing
In the ranks of the state militia for blood
You will fire at almost everything
At yourself first of all
And at the trees and their surroundings
You will grow up in your forced isolation
And adopt three sublime creeds
Then abandon them as if nothing had happened
And you will forget the thing whose existence was indispensable
You will light tyres in city squares in protest against humiliation and marginalization
And believe in the hero who stands in the shadow
You will grow up in the timeout period of the game
To be or try at least to be
With Saint Mandela and against the emperors
And with the oppressed black against the white master
With the water against the fire
And with the unarmed individual against everything that is armed
You will grow up like a tree that forgives nature for the tyranny of the wind
You will get older day by day
And this is the worst of it
You will grow up in step with fate
Or out of step perhaps in neighborhoods
Of Nairobi or Santiago or Aalborg
You’ll grow up you bastard but maturity is something else.
Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad is an author from Syria who currently lives in Germany. He writes Poetry, Stories and Social blogs and has published a number of them in international Literary magazines and websites translated to different languages such as: English, French, Dutch and Italian . He has also won the OSSI DI Seppia International Poetry Awards, as the best foreign author in the category of poetry.
