Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad: Selected Poems
Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad
I was always
The passenger
Who made the boat more likely to sink
Biography
He was a poet and resembled Rome
When embers were dropping from the trees in its first great fire
He was a poet and before he was a poet
He waged war on nature
He wiped out a flock of fragile birds
He loved the chaos that destroyed the lives of others
Just as he loved the hell that was always near them
He was a very dangerous poet
He wanted to imitate Jesus and Gandhi and Shakespeare
He wanted to slit open the veins of frozen waves with knives
He was a poet and a historian
He left us hot blood from the Cold War era
And poems the dictator used to comb with minesweepers
And other things including a woman
Rocking the sun on her knees
Birth
I was born
A little before my due date
On the night when controversy raged
About everything
A release conditional on obeying the terms
I was born deceived and still am deceived
At the moment when Satan was drinking a toast to his third victory
On the night when knives were being sharpened
I was born
With a memory sewn together with a needle and thread
Full grown in a way
With ideas liable to change
With an arm not up to armed combat
With a soul where anxiety has taken root
With a mouth that stammers when it speaks
And a compound name with no links to modernity
And a heart open to all possibilities
I was born
By divine decree
In the alleys
Of the third world
Following Plan B
In a somewhat primitive way
In the clinic of a midwife who didn’t believe in fate
I was born in installments
With this body liberated
From the womb that kept trying to abort it.
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
A Concert
In a while
And with these fingers that have never pulled a trigger
I will play a tune
On a sunflower
On your shirt buttons if I can
A tune
Longer than the river Rhine
More powerful than the whistling of the wind that travels with its diplomatic passport
To the sound of rumbling tanks
I will play that rebel tune
To the audience who doesn’t take the performance seriously
To the sun that investigates the identity of the new prophets
To dogs who think about sex
To that invincible force
I will play a tune
With or without these crooked fingers
On matchboxes
On walls
Where ‘The people want’ is written
On barbed wire sharper than it ought to be
On shoes that run marathons on bad days
I’ll play the tune
That’s spreading through these fingers now
Like a boat that has overcome its obsession with sinking.
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
Chastisement
We were beaten by fathers
Who used sticks to educate
And violence to intimidate
And by the new educators
In classes where we learned
The teachings of the national anthem
And that the god of mercy
Composed verses of forgiveness
And foxes give birth
To sly cubs
And sons of bitches are the original inhabitants of hell
And Indians worship cows
While we drive them to be slaughtered
And America the all-powerful
Is the one who starts wars
And every evil person is George Bush
We were beaten on these feet that were dragged into the abyss
On nights
When clouds stand for a minute’s silence
On nights when revolutions fail
On nights when stones migrate en masse from the Andes mountains
We were beaten
When comrades demolished a communist statue in Mariupol
When our dreams endured in torture chambers
When we peeled the wrinkles off rivers with Alzheimer’s
We were beaten
We who come from the third world
We are the ones who believe in things that make the gods unhappy
We are the ones who play symphonies on matchboxes
Children of the bars where wise flies get drunk
Children of the tents that accompany our life stories
Children of women deprived of abortion rights
Children of streets where dogs die of heart failure
We were beaten in the presence of stars that feed on midges
Sometimes
With gases that make tears flow
And sometimes with waves that play billiards on the back of the Mediterranean
And each occasion was appropriate.
Away from the microscope
Away from the scourge of censorship
Explain to us how an iron will dissolves in the face of hammer blows
And how the sun protects itself from heart attacks
And how gardenias bloom on walls that breathe crushed concrete
Away from the guardians of virtue
Steer clear of the words that sever umbilical cords
Rouse them from their slumber with mosquito spray or something harsher
Knead them with the music that frees roads from their darkness
Let them expel all the sighs suppressed within them
Load them with the freedom that shakes the firmness of iron fists
And train them
To box with sandbags
To crush Siberian ice
To strain their vocal chords
To pull tight the belt round the waist of the wind
Steer clear of the words that smell the corpse of nothingness
Words that don’t rely on support from any god
And let them build and destroy the world you will not see
The consequences will not be as great as you imagine
There is no longer a marked difference between right and wrong.
A philosopher and yet
We saw him as a philosopher
And he was
Always
He was an ambassador for lofty aims
A sturdy branch prepared for all eventualities
He depended on instinct to explain things
And we understood after much effort
The world is only three meters wide
And nature is its own enemy
Freedom is an earthquake measuring a thousand on the Richter scale
And certainty is rooted in nothingness
And the end happens every day
Every day there is an ending
We saw him as a philosopher
A branch crowded with question marks
And a speaker of sign language
Focus of rumors and hopes
Music was his flimsy crutch
And sometimes he embraced dogs that expressed their concerns
Leg embracing leg
He knew
The mentality of the fire we sit around
And the days when tanks turn their heads towards nothingness
And the nights when the god opens the doors of complaint
He walked on the maps that leapt from the trembling of the gentle waves
And his eyes ploughed the distant horizons in search
Of the solution
Of the wind
That would sever the roots that bind us to the depths
A Character with Many Faces
There is a poet getting madly drunk on stage
Comparing Jesus to Van Gogh
Napoleon to Charles Vane
And he says that he’s you
There is a shadow committing suicide each day by falling from the Himalayas
Falling alone with muffled cries
And he says that he’s you
There is a woman waiting for someone whose breaths are stained by doubt
And he says that he’s you
A woman claiming your pain is a malignant tumor that triumphs easily over tranquilizers
There is a soldier always fighting
With gangs who invade diamond mines
And every time a magic charm he has no faith in saves him
And he says that he’s you
I’m telling the truth even if this seems impossible to you
There is someone
Who digs a trench in the horizon then fills it up with piles of stars
Are they your fingers? Is it your hand that digs at such great speed?
Is it you? Is it you?
Translated into English by Catherine Cobham
