Where does the distance end? Where does fear cease to reign?
I summon the void. I empty the full. Even flint is soft, even sand originates in water.
Why the roads, why the arrival?
Astray, astray, and I'll not return. Falling is my state and condition; paradise is my contrary.
A wedding I am; and I announce the attractiveness of death. I am the clouds, and know no dryness; I am aridity and have no clouds.
I hide behind the riddle, hide under the gowns of the seasons
and peep through their holes. I grant my steps their form
and say unto the sea: Follow me.
Trees are leaves in my notebooks; stones are verses like me. I'll abrade the skin of the horizon, make it bleed and flow. I'll fly between the wound and the wound.
We divide space between us: Death and I.
We raise the banner of famine: Bread and I.
And tomorrow I'll get entangled in the garments of the legend and climb the wall of shadows. Then, a procession of psalms of stone will cling to me.
O, Madness, my master, my Christ.

I search for a sun that dwells in the eyes, for eyes which behold the light - all of the light.
I seek a tree trunk which turns into a body. I seek what gives the word a sex organ and pierces the sky.
I seek what gives to stone the lips of children, to history a rainbow and to the songs the larynxes of trees.
I seek what extends the rippling frontiers, the frontiers invisible between the sea and the rocks, the clouds and the sands, daylight and night.
I seek what unifies our accents: God and I, Satan and I, the world and I; and what sows between us the seeds of conflict.

O, Spirit of quest, O, my vessel.

A SONG TO HE

I have not said, O, brother, You are dead.
I have said: You will go, and you know what is coming.
Your steps have halted, but your shadow
still extends with a child's hands.
I wonder:
Are you still alive?
Are my eyes your eyes?
Is death mirrors between us?
I see what you have seen,
translate myself to myself.
Are we, I wonder, a single body
sharing the bread of tragedy,
the bread of love and life?
Two strangers, two gaunt, down-trodden figures.?
I cry: I am the Karbula'* of yearning.
And you shout: O, my master, al-Husain.

A SONG TO THE SECRET

Leave him to his secrets.
He seats the sea at times on his lap,
and at times below his window.
Leave him to his secrets.
He masquerades with grass,
or wears the face of stone.
Leave him to his secrets.
He is a field of love
which changes with every season,
turning over the trees in his palms.

A SONG TO LANGUAGES

All these languages, these fragments,
are leaven
for the cities to come.
Change the structure of the noun, the verb, the letter;
say:
No veils remain between us,
no dams.
And delight your hearts with the fatihas*
of the Suras* of desire
and the ecstasies of their sealed heavens.

UNBOUNDED FLIGHTS

For angels forged of silver and lead,
for sands trailing their golden cloaks,
collapsing and sobbing in the cage of the alphabet,

his land is the lung bleeding,
as a river loses its course,
and lightning its flashing flame;

and I see it slumbering.

Yet, I confront these deserts,
as though I were the dawn of speech.
I say without surprise:
A time of desire and widows of metal
and the place is splitting apart.
-This place has always been splitting apart;
has been maps of mustiness and dust.
Always has this place been
splintering in two fists
of siege and devouring.

Yet, I confront this labyrinth,
as though I were the dawn of speech.
And I say without surprise:
A star appeared and was devoured by ants,
and I repeat that smoke
is the nuptial of the winds.
O, winds,
accept what remains of my body :
two roses, my anxiety and my yearning,
weave out of them your invisible shawls,
and let them be our greeting
to wandering and its Arabian ruins.

And I say without surprise:
This homeland is no more than a conjecture,
and it is now....
- Don't utter a word.
Have you gone mad, or have the visions led you astray?
And it is now a cemetery: a metallic policeman, burial of the living,
and where are you from?

Had you crossed the borders here and there,
and seen the ones who yearn for light
folded as clothing
and dumped into bottomless pits of darkness,
you would have wished that all speech became
destruction and raging fires,
would have torn these maps, these banners,
and would have, like me, blasphemed.
This homeland is no more than a bit of a conjecture.

And I say without surprise:
The millions are green ; from them arise the voice and the echo,
and I am the wolf of this space,
the only one who suffers the agonies of death,
and stumbles astray,
no star, no guidance,
lost between one field and another,
groping for the veins of grass,
and asking each flower
about its sister.

And I say without surprise:
Console me, O, time of weariness.
I have come to like crouching by the rock of the impossible,
like a child who loves travelling
in space,
mounting the back of a reed.

- Do not say: Despair and escapism.
The wind escapes in order to embrace the Earth,
and despair opens its regal doors
to the explosions of the orbits.
Say: A bearer of ill tidings.
And listen to the witness hiding
behind the trunks of palm trees,
and read the witness inscribed with dates and ginger
in leaves of silk...
And I say without surprise to the dew:
Have you seen the place, experienced the fields?
Are those covering them people or plants?
Thus I dare to adore the dew
and sing for it,
flowing as though early dawn were its banks,
opening its bags like letters between the branches of trees.
What do your hands carry?
For whom does the horizon write its secrets?
Is the road stretching along your banks another blood,
an adventurous gleam,
or a gasping poet?

And I say without surprise:
My amazement is that I have not yet aged,
that this wreckage
has only bestowed greater splendour
upon me.
- Here is a rose lusting
to be a woman in his arms.
- Here are his extinguished fires
beginning to glow.

And now I am a child,
as though the moon were bells
in my footsteps .
I say without surprise:
I have my passion,
my everlasting intoxication .
The letters are women who whisper to me whatever they desire,
and to them I grant my unbounded flights.
And, free of all illusions, I declare:
This is my life-
Sparks and horses of light,
bolting out of the chariots of images.

ANOTHER SONG TO HE

They girdle him with their eyelashes
and cast their shade over his body.
Amongst them, he is like a soul
fluttering;
love is a throne,
and the sun in his hands
is an incense burner.
And around him,
their myths grow taller.
How, when and whence do I enter into this throng ?
And I am only the story - teller, only the narrator.
I am nothing but the echo
watchful at his prophetic door-
the echo,
and the throes of death of words.

THE BEGINNING OF SWEEPING

Don't say:" You have gone mad."
My madness is your dreams/ we've come
and painted the fields
a body in bloom.
We used to say:
"If only we would come and rape the universe."
And we have come.

He who sees you sees me- I, the primordial rose.
In the ashes of evening I broke,
with dawn I perfumed my roots- my downy leaves
gathered as a ladder /
Is that the voice of someone approaching?
Or footsteps fading away?

He who sees you sees me- I, who reveals
the secret thoughts
and offers himself to thunder:
this is a shaft of light.
Change the image of nature,
mix rock with wings, ecstasy with tragedy.
Everything on Earth is new /
My face an open space,
and the distance the beginning of eyes.

He who sees you sees me /
We screamed:
"There is no path but the path of fire." We 've come.
No coming unless it strikes as lightning;
and we've come.
Prisons are still growing ;
exiles flutter with eyelashes;
fear is raging, and those possessed by fear
are leaves.
Prisons are growing /
And they fall upon poetry in cloaks, in corners,
invoking their canonical rules,
and walking in a space of beads.

And I am the one who shatters all rules,
I, the primordial womb.

And they say: "This is obscurity."
And they say: "This is a world of absence."

O, regal lust,
take my words into your world of absence.
Take my steps into your world of absence.
And bolt and take me,
O, regal lust.

If you see at the university gate
a star, take her by the hand.
If you see at the university gate
a planet, embrace him...
We wrote on the university gate:
Histories are crumbling.
The fires are ravaging .
Our steps
are flames penetrating the corpse of the Earth.
We uproot the family
to establish friendship/ Sing.
Sing for the fractures which cover this time with wounds,
for this is the time of crumbling /
Sing.

Sing for the devouring tragedy.
Make room for the chained body
to give a feast for nature,
make room for its songs.

Sauntering you have come, submerged
in the ocean of Arab blood.
More luscious you have come
than a thunderbolt.

Don't say:" You've gone mad."
My madness is your dreams/ we've come,
descended into the darkness, broken its lanterns, and come
like a land yearning for rain/ we've come
like thunder draped in clouds/ A promise:
You will be dawn,
and Time will be balconies for our dreams...

Everything is new on Earth; the alphabet is flames,
and madness a voyage between it and me,
a horizon
spelling the invisible frontiers.
And our name is one-

I ' ve rooted myself in trees that never die.
I ' ve seen the steps, and seen the houses
crumbling, crumbling /
These are my sparks.

The distance is pregnant.
Our name is one- and we are sweeping.
This is our space:

to shatter the orbits, to be nothing
but this madness
madness
madness.

THE BEGINNING OF SPEECH

That child I had been
came once to me
a strange face.

He said nothing . We walked,
each glancing at the other in silence; our steps
a river flowing estranged.

In the name of the leaves strewn in the wind,
the origins brought us together.
Then we departed,
a forest inscribed by the Earth,
and narrated by the seasons.

O, child that I once was, come near.
What is there now to draw us together?
And what is there to say?

THE BUNDLE OF REEDS

(Faces and masks. A hall with many entrances of a bygone style).

- I -

FACE 1: I hear that people are angry,
that in their hearts
prayer entwines with fire...

MASK 2: Angry?
They'll soon be calm and contented.
The sword and gold
will extinguish their fire...

FACE 1: It will blaze again.

MASK 2 (fervently): So will blaze again,
tying them up like a bundle of reeds,
the sword and gold
and the flames of murder.
(He falls silent; then, as if dreaming)

Then the hearts will falter
and the knees will totter,
and the rebels will be cooked
like chicken for a feast...

(He laughs)

FACE 1: You scorn people, lock them up like cattle
waiting for slaughter;
you devour them...
MASK 2 (astonished):
A new larynx
sharpened on the blade of the rebels?

(in a tone of advice)

Leave the people alone, my friend.
They are, as I have discovered, a monster
always hungry
unless you feed it to the sword,
or stuff its mouth with gold.

(Exits).

(Masks bowing down to the ground; in one corner a woman, erect like a statue, embracing a skull).

MASK 1 ( resembling a barrel; headless, addressing FACE 1, and gesturing towards the bowing masks):

The people, your eternal amulet.
You see?
(Pointing scornfully to the bowing masks).

FACE 1: No. It's your tyrannical image
that you have displayed.
The people are neither straws
for you to break, nor a mask...
MASK 1 (furiously):
Take him;
make his head a gift,
a human goblet of bones .

(Exit some masks, dragging FACE 1; other masks enter).

- II -

MASK 2 (addressing MASK 1, while presenting him with a goblet - shaped skull):
The first of my gifts to my lord
as people witness .
(pointing to the masks)
Tell him; come forth...
MASK 3 (taking a skull, goes forward; stands in military fashion in front of MASK 1):

Their voices stretch under our steps
like a staircase.
(steps aside)

MASK 4 (carrying an arm, moves forward in military fashion stopping parallel to MASK 3):

Their shoulders are lean
and carmine-like pillows.

MASK 5 (carrying a leg and an arm; same movements):

Their bodies are blown like the corpse of the desert,
and the desert is like a table laid for a feast.

MASK 1 (in a husky, crazed voice ):

The spear. Here...
in the heart and consciousness,
in the navel of the pregnant woman,
in the eye of the child,
in the inhaling and exhaling,
in the nearby trees and the distant stars.
Murder, here... My only seeds.
Here, here....
My only land.

(Everybody bursts into crazy laughter)

FOUR SONGS FOR THE BUNDLE OF REEDS

1- The Hungry Man (A Dream )
Hunger paints on his notebook
stars or roads,
and covers the leaves
with veils of dreams.
We glimpsed
a sun of love fluttering its eyelashes,
and glimpsed
a rising dawn.

2 - Sleep and Rising from Sleep

In his sleep, he fashions a model
for a rampant revolution
which embraces the rising future.

Then he awakens;
his days become
a parrot
lamenting the passing night
and his vanished dreams.

3- The People
(A Dream)

The trees gathered
laden, like fruits, with screams and yearning,
and marched
along the riverbanks.
Thunder rattled them
as though it were sparks.

The trees were struck dumbfounded
in sorrow over their captive birds
on the other side of the river's flank.

4- Wrath
( A Dream )

The Euphrates is enraged.
Its banks are filled with larynxes,
towers of shocks and thunder;
and the waves are horses.

I saw dawn with its tresses cut,
I saw the water, its roaring sharpened,
flowing, embracing its spears.

The Euphrates is enraged.
Neither the fire, nor the prayers
will extinguish that wounded wrath.

CHARMS FOR THE CITIES OF AL- GHAZALI

1 - The Body of A Pebble

That which I have called the history and the beginning
is smooth, closed, and lifeless
like the body of a pebble.
That which grants us its providence
is a spider's bed.
The waters in the Orantes and Euphrates
are ink.
The desert of footsteps is words
or papers, no difference.
And the citadels, bundled up, are running .
A bare night. No dreams, no rays.

No ; you are not a water lily,
nor a bunch of the roses of brotherhood.
Neither inspiration nor prophecy,
nor a wakeful star by the bridge
reading the waters of the river.

No body in you reads,
no body asks questions .
You are a tyrant
who bakes bread
out of the victims' bodies.
Nor are you
the breasts of a virgin
in a festival for love.

....A skin you are;
no more than a goat's skin,
even if you procreate, hire a husband
and come to people in a silken dress
and with a human countenance.

And I am Fate, I am the way.
I shake the sea.
My death is a ship,
and my remains
an alphabet
or an imminent explosion.

2 - Had You Dwelled

Had you dwelled, as I said, in my voice,
you would have found the right path
and its orbit of ascendance ;
you would have draped yourself
in the garments of the travellers,
who drink the suns and their dimensions
in their enthralling trance.

And would have quenched your thirst.

Had you dwelled, as I said, in my voice,
you would have become the word of divination
and its rainbow-like lighthouses
between our paper-like days
and the snows of the distance.

And would have found the right path.

3 - The Foundation

- In order for it to stand erect,
in order for it to be,
grip its hand this way
and hold its face.
Invent a spark;
devour its belt and motionless shoulder,
and pull to the left
its stubborn axis;
and move the crouching corner.

Then,
alter the base and stones
and change the foundation...