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 Translated from the French by the author
The following is an excerpt from The Arab Apocalypse, Copyright 1989 by Etel Adnan, with drawings by the author.
NOTE: The images are an integral part of this text, please load all images before reading.
IX
 The sun paces the sky like a trapped animal 
Fat human faced pig never dimmed yellow sun Hou hou hou
I saw chickens in the sun's eye I saw a dog TORTURE!
BURN is the film thunder and sun over CUBA  a cargo of light Houuuuu
Beirut the Yellow in its forest of guns 12 and May and 75 MUTE SEWN CITY
The sun has its mouth stitched with with barbed wire STOP butcher's Arab sun
A sun of iron walks in a forest of guns  an eye bursts open STOP
Ishi cried this morning  STOP I counted up to 5 STOP the sea is on the phone
yellow sun exterminated ancestor sun green spring purple sun quasar
the sun has fallen in anti-matter there where mornings go ARCHANGEL
the sun spread in the acid city of Beirut burned with sulfur
More irreversible than death is the sun  Round cloth and rooster's head
They carried the sun on the back of a donkey to the top of the hill 1000 men came 
A sun laid disfigured STOP  Two airplanes. STOP interminable ambulance
the pink column smashed the face STOP the stone column broke the spine
a purple sun siezed with vertigo speed in its protuberances 
X
A pink doveshattered a human face  A solar hair in its beak
a yellow sun stop a green sun stop a blue sun stop
I asked the sun not to dismantle my body unified for ever
the sun is bawling its heat. Bawling its pain  The sound of plants STOP
a yellow sun a vociferous sun a blue sun a sun oozing its electrodes
a crazy sub a yellow sun a plam tree blinking in the sun's eye
a sun ambulance carries Christ to the insane asylum  Close to the monkeys
a yellow sun hates the color green sun hating plants Hou ! ! !
the sun swings from one universe to another STOP the sun swings from one universe to another
My right eye is a sun my left eye is a sun my ears two sunds
my nostrils two suns  I have the sun on my forehead STOP
my feet are two suns STOP EACH FINGER is a sun
a sun at each toe STOP a sun in the arms in the anus in the neck 
my feet are two sunds my ears two suns my nostrils two suns
and this sun at the mouth cancer until the end of the stars 
XI
A yellow sun a mad sun a quiet sun a red sun a a
Helios sun moon reduced to a sun between two rocks BOUM BOUM BOUME !
A solar wind pulls your teeth Hou ! Hou ! the future is a wind
a young boat on the wrinkles of the sea in the sun's eye VOYEUR !
the sloar wind blows at 500 miles per second ! HOULA ! ! !
interplanetary circular dust accompanies the traveling whirling sun
the sun revolves in twenty-seven days and its pain affects me
I hurt at the sun's belly  the sun hurts at my belly O my love!
I love a yellow sun you love a blue sun he loves a red sun
the sun plays STOP the sun cries STOP the sun falls asleep STOP
A maddeningly yellow a wart on my nose  satellites
the sun waits foir SOYUZ the sun waits for APOLLO the sun is GARGARIN
Malevich's red sun followed his funeral convoy all the way to Beirut
ETEL ADNAN is a poet, painter and essayist living in Paris and in Sausalito, California. Her novel Sitt Marie Rose has been published in six languages worldwide and is considered a classic of Middle Eastern literature. Her latest books in English are Paris When It's Naked and Of Cities and Women (both from Post-Apollo Press
http://users.rcn.com/tpapress/Apocalypse.excerpt3.html
In the earth's bowels we gather, and project deadly operations, right here, under my feet, and it involves death, always, regardless of the hour, or the sea's decisions, and you appear amongst us, - Mayakovsky in Vermeer's kitchen - , bewildered, could anybody plan your death, could they kill your old neighbor, would they prevent him from watching the news, that night, - would his soul look at his body lying in a pool of his own blood - yes, they will, and you would do the same, for similar or different reasons, the killing comes first, the reasons, after.
We crossed jungles, do you remember, the expectation was outgrowing the coconut trees, we were liberating the world, from its masters, its failures, from our capacity for murder. We buried Bolivian peasants next to the Che, needing to reenact the story of Christ as far as the sources of the Amazon. We went there. That voyage is stored in memory.
He who counts the hours loses his sense of timelessness, and we count our dead, overlooking their desire for immortality. It's always too late, too late for what, for the conversation we want to carry on in a late afternoon in Café Bugatti, somewhere on the West Coast, away from the front line, but the war is all around us, visible at different degrees according to the mind's sharpness. We always die on some well-defined spot. The body goes back to some territory, always familiar.
Floods. As persistent as the sun could be. It is in the early mornings of the Bay that a peace I would share with you invades my awareness. The light seems to steam out of the ground and carries the soul into a sensation of beginnings. Things seem possible which have something to do with the thrust of living.
It's clear there, over there, as I see it from my window, my brain is sharper than the radio satellite which is circling the world, I don't need to travel in order to visit the disappeared streets of my hometown, and you are doing the same, I'm sure, even if the city of your birth stands gloriously under its flag, but you lost for ever the particular light which accompanied you to school between ages four and six.
A street is territory borrowed from the past, or a tunnel in which we engulf ourselves in search of transfiguration. In fact, we're engaged in the destruction of things we love because impatience is part of passion; let us break to pieces our doomed relation's various elements, pain is the only way open...
Dead, deadly, is death. Time is counted, let us not count the weightlessness of the love we experienced. When and why are altogether another matter. Is there any light ahead, any sky which would lift itself and not fear the sun?
* * *
Such impotence in so much beauty, there... Why are there so many young prostitutes among the men; street corners, garbage, police and flies feeding on corpses, heat, narrowness?
Don't bargain for my possessions. They may not leave. Here, around the house, defined perimeters can't keep the sea's roar away from my head. You're hiding behind rose bushes. I sweat during each calendar night, your face confronting me with its perennial presence.
Women weep under their black robes, they climb and throw flowers and rice, instead of grenades, do listen, do you exchange arguments with me, or them, why is the sea green while we're talking, and is she remembering my grandparents whom I never met - their dust was already spread over the highlands when I was born - , and you keep asking if I'm still alive and I have no answer to that.
Currents meet in my body while it swims and I become water, part of water. The "you" is always the "I", so we inhabit each other in our irremediable singleness.
Deep in my sleep, somewhere still unknown, water was running and there is war said your voice, the future was being dismantled, and is love possible, your question was hanging over my tranquillity.
Yes, whose and whose beginning, comets are exploding on the side of wounded planets. Space is black-and-white movies and your skin is catching fire.
Who is eating at the mountain when the moon sits on it? Yes. Before memory came into being there was an orange moon, there, and I went by it, walking, passenger of its sister the earth, and we were alone, and why I don't know.
This heat is keeping the pressure on us, something will break loose in this speed, this terror.
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