Selections

Reem Ghanayem
Selected Poems

Poems continued from Banipal 45 – Writers from Palestine, p 174

Translated by the author


THE NINTH INTERVAL

O Goddess of my salvation
end every pride with a pride
every hope with pain
every assumption with another, yet more delusive.
Append to my false biography a yet bigger banishment
which resembles the lives of women prophets
and the doubt of the heart

SOMETIMES NO SOUND IS LOUDER THAN THAT OF A CROW AT DAWN, PRICKED BY HUNGER, DEFEATED BY THE STORM

Suddenly,
dawn is thrust deeply inside you
You hurt, scattering wind instruments
You hush, you have the audacity of a swallow 
protruding like rocks of women poets
Dust of dawn has slimy murmurs
and surrender to them has the numbness of death
How wonderful you are!
How impossible . . . like metallic shoes

TRANSLATION INTO THE LITERAL, THE EXAGGERATED

Why, whenever goodness overtakes me
a day’s chronicle stirs my heart?
And why,
whenever shoe whips overwhelm me in vain
I become a blind cloud stuffed with jealousy?

COMPARED TO EVERY BLESSED INTIMACY

Modest as she is
deliberately she deflowers herself
Impregnates herself
Her pubic hair turns gray
Cursed she is
and cursed the delusion of her lineage


From the author’s poetry collection Mag, fi Sirat al-Manafi,
published by Dar al-Jamal, Beirut–Baghdad, 2012



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