translation: SARA HAMID HAWASS
Ahmad Al-Shahawy is a poet, writer and journalist from Damietta, Egypt. He is the author of more than 20 books and poetry collections. Al-Shahawy got a fellowship in literature from the University of Iowa, USA 1991. He has recieved the UNESCO Literature Prize 1995 and Cavafy Poetry Prize 1998.
The moon without an apple
Is dark.
The night without an apple
Is empty.
Hands without an apple
Are paralyzed.
The body without a red apple
Is broken.
The apple without lips
Is damaged.
Your fruits called me
So I made pilgrimage.
One Pilgrimage isn’t enough for a lover
Can’t a find a way to you.
I promise you with silence
Not with talk.
I promise you with all of me
Not with my shadow.
I promise you with my letter
Not with what I speak.
I promise you with my face
Not with my mirror.
I promise you with my shyness
Not with my emotional froth.
So don’t promise me
With what is not you.
I flew with wings of wax like a god,
To get very close to your sun.
My wings melted when I melted and tasted .
I visited the Kaaba,
Carrying my sea.
Did I die a martyr of my attempt?
Or I went to your sea,
To be awakened from death
And come to you.
What is your paradise?
He said: the two breasts.
What is your paradise, poet?
He said: the two breasts.
Do you have anything else?
He said: the world is lifted up by them.
I can not ignore the sky’s right
Of being lifted up by their inspiration.
I die every night alone
And you are in your bed
Reciting a history,
burning what is passed away,
Or enlivening a dead,
In memory.
Do you know what is the meaning
Of smelling your wheat
Without seeing myself in your loaf?
Every empty seat is mine.
I know the sea
Of every bare mountain of salt
The fish of every rain falling
Is mine.
All the horses of darkness
Know my name.
I know the angel
Of every stone I see by chance.
Every spider built a golden house,
Lays on my hand.
Every woman gets along
With viola,
Has no shrine
Except under my cloak (Jubbah).
Every woman steps an archway
Is only blessed my me.
I am the outflow
Of every loss on earth.
I earned her name
Since I trusted the myths.
And that is enough
For a poet whose goal
Is temptation.
I asked
What is hell?
To love
And no echo.
To ask
And no answer.
To write
And no reader.
To sleep
And no one is in the dream.
To pray
And no God.
To carry a key
And no house.
To open the palm
Of your hand
And you don’t find
A woman reading.
It was just a black shirt,
But my father saw it a crow,
And he surprised me
That it looked like his mother’s robe.
My father died,
After the crow flew over my body,
Time after time.
The shirt is gone,
My father is gone,
The crow is gone.
But I haven’t been able to sleep
For forty years.
Because I hear nothing,
But the crow’s cawing.
Your lips are my ladder to my secret,
to a nascent star,
with no name in my sky,
to a river’s desert that got crazy with its treasure.
To places we won’t see
again with each other,
and others are waiting.
To a second that is a long time.
To a chair that is a throne.
From them I arrived two fires,
and I became letters carrying you.
Your lips are my galaxy and my weight.
They are the end of the beginning,
Where there is no end,
Where “where” is no “no where”,
Where a place you don’t find,
My forefinger heading towards it.
The shadow never asked,
about his name,
about the lodging room,
about his pains
about his remote loneliness,
about his biography as a nomadic.
about his childhood,
about his orphanhood,
about a tree slept in his bed,
about death came to him at night,
about the drowned of the Nile.
He came slowly.
His hands carried my name,
“minus a letter’’.
He thought I was a god.
Sara Hamid Hawass is an Egyptian linguist, academic, writer and translator. Currently, she holds the position of Lecturer of Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts at Mansoura University.
