Free Lessons

My mum taught me to be rude.
A blank
in a pitch-black wall.
A dirty laugh in the mouth of a lioness.
A rough bite
not suitable for forgetting parties.
Fortune telling
on the chessboard.
And the tricks of the vows
that we need to sneak into heaven.
She prepared me from an early age.
Candy earrings.
A ring made of palm fronds.
A jar of ink that will never complete a meaning
ful sentence
and a wax mould of a knife.
She waited for me far away.
Watching me
as I stole a handful of my father’s ashes.
My sister’s wedding saving box
and the spoilt son
who hugs his image
in the eyes of beautiful women.

I will wait for death in my coronary artery

Loneliness

The intermittent whirring of your genetic code

separates you from a mirror

greedily consuming your seven souls.

If I said I watched my life from the fourth floor

the cold bite would believe me

and the owl that now hangs on my window.

I saw myself, oh world

and I knew it...

Twenty years from now.

An old woman babbling at a funeral

holding a radio in her lap like a lover’s beating heart.

A radio still with its thorns and blood

and its old function.

She keeps hope in a blue jar next to the cumin

despair is posted with red chillies on the balcony.

With a few grains she feeds a wounded dove

and with the dove she saves a lame crow.

Her memory lurks in every familiar scent

and prays on a shard of light.

Her doctor says that eternity is a giant worm eating her liver

she laughs.

Those giggles hang over her head every night

she plucks one of them.

She swallows it with a painkiller

and falls asleep.

Ancient Sessions for Exile

I don’t know the way to heaven.

I am not a rose

waiting to bloom over your grave.

Nor a wild star

emerging from the zodiac charts

rebelling against fate.

I am not the hand that the stones tilted upwards

and plucked from Newton’s

the gravity of exile.

I am an ordinary woman.

When the devil consults me about something

I sit down with him without hesitation.

I talk to him like an old comrade.

Like me

he suffers the curse of foreignness

and the severity of rejection.

He is the best person to advise.

He has tried all kinds of wastes

and read the whole of Adam

before God removed a rib from him.

‍

About the cloud that fell into your cup

The Oracle reassures you:

it will come out to you.

Full of stamps like worn-out summer letters.

Barefoot.

With your poem in her hair.

And your purple ring in her white bra.

With an old smile licking your lips,

you forget the bitterness of rust

and the disappointment of kisses.

You will stand at the end of the street,

bragging about your comrades who left in the autumn swirls.

In your eyes, the shyness of the moment evaporates.

She looks sadly at the dead bodies of the days on her doorstep

and empty cosmetics boxes.

You eat an orange

not caring about the wilted sunflower bouquet in your hands.

She,

didn’t say she inherited the curse of immortality and rebirth

But her legs, when she wraps them around you,

are two angry branches

catching a bird that is fluttering.

Drowning Temptation

One last time

a thorn stood in his throat.

The prick of pain felt refreshing.

And that the thorn could

sing if he listened.

To plant the ocean in his stomach.

The lost boats

and hooks.

To be the seed of his goldfish

if they open his grave

and drowned

in the salt.

For a second time

he brought sand to his bed.

It is what we find

in the pockets of the drowned,

the mirror makers

and the lonely ones

He thought of putting on his linen shirt

and wrap his fish in a bouquet

and present it

to the nymph of the bar.

He thought of writing her name on a prescription.

As a malignant disease

or a necessary medicine,

and let her choose.

As luck would have it

he asked the sand

about the love that never stops.

She didn’t tell him about his rotten fish

under the bed.

One last time.

He put an anesthetic pill in his mouth,

and reassured himself of the balance between pain

and coughing.

He sprinkled a few prayers

in the bedroom and kitchen,

and remembered God in the window

before he threw it

over the ceiling fan

and fell asleep.

He searched for an odor that tears his house.

The curtains are tired over his eyes

with their pale colours

and their unmelting heaviness.

About the instinct

that makes the wolf’s house fearful

and reveals the limit of his control;

a splash of urine

that defies

barking dogs.

For once he thought,

what do the dead have to do but wait?

The ceiling of perfection

I don’t read

I don’t write either

nor do I lead a caravan of letters

to fall into the trap of meaning.

All of what happened

my mother dreamt of a tree

in front of the house

and my father wanted spare parts

for his motorcycle

and his neglected car.

I was born

green, so green

my windows are full of birds

my trunk leans to hold my little brothers

and every time a leaf passes

in front of my eyes

the neighbours whisper:

Ahmed’s daughter will walk naked.

They pour some starch on my head,

cotton fluffs

and the fluff of their dry moments.

They tie my legs with a rope

to make me lean towards the east

like a virtuous woman

or as a,

as a malfunctioning engine of a stone heart.

‍

Reda Ahmed is an Egyptian poet.

‍