Banipal (UK) Magazine of Modern Arab Literature - Selections - Banipal No 25

Zahra Yusri
It’s Night

it’s night
it’s half light
it’s trees at a distance
nature throwing you on its shores
you stretch your legs, looking at the horizon
it’s the stars
the moon
the chemistry of the body
it’s an illusion
a delusion
the jungles of a forest
bare walls
warm rooms
it’s the mud
the bed
warm walls
cold rooms
it’s the cosmos
everything
and nothing
is this enough to make you hold my face in your hands?
can we summon up some opening phrases,
can we look at the moon,
(how beautiful it is tonight!)
and lean against a tree, paying no attention to its rough trunk,
pretending that what scrapes our backbone is desire?

we can climb a mountain and then descend it, wondering
how the earth rose up all of a sudden like that
how we have become all alone with no families
hanging by our toes like pendulums
as if we have never been here before
as if born yesterday
we stand facing each other
you holding my face in your hands
me looking into your eyes like an old she-wolf deserting her pack
do you know what an old she-wolf does?
how mountain goats lock horns in the mating season?
have you ever seen a flower opening up for a butterfly’s legs?

it’s night
don’t close your eyes
night’s half light is enough to delude
our senses

Translated by Waiel Ashry