Maged Zaher: Five Untitled Poems

Maged Zaher by Youssef Rakha, Oldish Cafe, 12 August 2021

*

To Youssef Rakha

Revolution is a brand

Come again in proper clothes

And say that you love me

Do this before I die

.

*

My body is good for figure drawing

It is dark enough

And it has unusual curves

I’ve never used the word “adhesion” in my poems

I am tired

I am actually dead

But having dinner

I don’t exist here

I arrived earlier

To have coffee

And read literature

Early on

I loved everyone

I also

Hated myself

The good part

Is that all of us will perish

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Youssef Rakha Translates Sargon Boulus, Again

Butterfly Dream

The butterfly that flies as if

tied by an invisible thread to paradise

almost brushed my chin while I sat in the garden

drinking my first coffee

shaking last night’s nightmares out of my head

lolling in the sun

I saw it drift over the wooden fence

like a dream or a prayer, what was

only yesterday a caterpillar

locked up in its tight cocoon.

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Tọ́pẹ́ Salaudeen-Adégòkè: To Hypothesize Like E C Catalan

Head of the wife of an Ooni, the traditional ruler of the ancient Yoruba city of Ile-Ife, 1930s. Source: 1stdibs.com

(For Onnie)

I have tried to count our minted coins:

They are Z⁺ of integers slipping through mind

Like a money changer sans numismatic head.

Perhaps I am a failed Pythagorean

Perhaps I am a failed mathematicist

That I have always been all my life.

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Shaimaa Abdelkarim: Two Poems

Anna Boyiazis, from “Finding Freedom in the Water”, Zanizibar, 2018. Source: lifestyle.luxusni-bydleni-praha.com

Tremolo Provocateur

untuned time

those improvised lines

unearthed tragedies

awaited

agency is someone else’s fortune

when all they see

genres of what we be

عيون ترسم واقعا لتلوم ما لم يكن

ويغدو الآخر في خيال مقتبس

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Miggy Angel: from “Boy, Bestiary”

Northumberland Bestiary (Detail), 1250–60, courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

Call me blood,

brother. Crouched

ogre gathers

forces together

under gangrenous

cover. Street

lamps glow

ochre. Never-Never

gonna Land

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Alexander Booth: from “Insulae”

Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Venice, 2003. Source: magnumphotos.com

On a major thoroughfare between a porn theatre and a filling station, it was just past the central cemetery and the bridge over the railway lines. A young communist lived in the room across from yours. He worked in a hotel. You had no job and no prospects but, for the moment, didn’t care. You’d sit together at the brittle table in the kitchen, all dark browns and orange, smoking, and listening to cassettes of sixties pop tunes, with small cups of coffee, now and again a beer. You had a couple of books and some traveler’s checks. Day after day you’d wander the sunburnt city, surprised, over and over again, at how often you got lost.

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Ogada: Two Poems

Cyrus Kabiru (SMAC Gallery), from “C-Stunners”. Source: weareafricatravel.com

let me remember you

we mold differently,

teenage-fly hearts,

with phone calls we don’t want to end

what we don’t know how to do,

is walk away

i have known you

for introducing me to nature trails,

and each tickle of a touch

evokes the treks shared

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Petero Kalulé: 3 ear etudes*

Jennifer Kincaid, Digital 3D model of the human cochlea. Source: indigo.uic.edu

Cochlea

if the kernel of

sound is quiver,

the ear shall l-

oose tether, &

knell itself in

echo

of whether whether

wither w–

here:

*the ear is a kind of leaf

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𝐹𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 Arabic

— Agha Shahid Ali reading “Of It All”

1997

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𝐹𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 Water Wives

— Poetry Foundation Podcast of Khaled Mattawa‘s “Boat Merchant’s Wife”

2019

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𝐹𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 Leaving

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—

A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar—

All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;

Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities

multiply me at once under your spell tonight.

He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.

He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

— from “Tonight” by Agha Shahid Ali

2003

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I Saw a Man Hugging a Fridge: Twelve Poems by Youssef Rakha in Robin Moger’s Translation

Alex Webb, Gonaives, Haiti, US invasion, 1994. Source: magnumphotos.com

First song of autumn

Joy of my days, come

watch me run

I’ve bought white shoes

and see-through eagle’s wings

I am the clarinet’s mouth

and you the ransomed player

Kneel and guzzle me, set

the sea’s taste in my throat

and make my breast a wave

upon whose mane the sun

sows jewels

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Noor Naga: No One Walks Woman in Alexandria

Anti-harassment stencil graffiti by Keizer. The legend reads “Check yourself before we check you”. Source: tavaana.org

The men of this city make animal

sounds as if to say

I got a slaughter with your neck

on it now how

you gonna walk with your psst-psst hidden

all your psst-psst hiding

from me

and my tick-tick pointing

pants how now you gonna walk two-legged

with my panting your

stiff sniffable neck and my smick-smack with my

bone back watching—

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Dhaka Dust: A Portfolio by Saqif Hossain

.Can’t occupy the same space at the same time

unless, of course, you land in Dhaka, rickshaws

five or six abreast. They are all here:

studded metal backboards ablaze with red flowers,

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Two Ways into Bara, by Zahreddine: Speaker of the Baran Tribe

(1)

Go to the street, ask for anything, it will be given to you.

BARA will have seized the monarchies and set their palaces ablaze.

There is a fellow population suffering.

To have lived it, later generations will assume it caused great conflict of the heart.

But, take my trials, they are too good for me.

Remember, the videos passed around.

I am guilty.

There is nothing left to say.

White sheets compound the pavement.

Chemicals in the territory.

The revolution is a farce.

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Robin Moger Translates Sukaina Habiballah

From the Aperture Foundation’s Paul Strand Book by Joel Meyerowitz. Source: studiobaer.com

nes t ree

in turn I bore straw

much straw and went

in search of a tree to make

my nest but a tree I did not find

and with the straw I’d gleaned I packed

my chest I picked a field and I stood upright there

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Robin Moger Does Dhu’r-Rummah

8th-century Umayyad tapestry fragment. Source: metmuseum.org

You know that home is come undone

to nothing? Now

thornbush and hollow

pieced in an unbroken plain

as Spica sets receive its rains,

first falls that pass and circle,

fall again.

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Aashish Kaul: Phantom Days

Cian Dayrit, from Spectacles of the Third World, 2015. Source: tin-aw.com

in this world, beauty is so common

— Jorge Luis Borges

Again I wake up with the sound of drums in my ears, the mattress hard under me. I bury my face in the crook of my arm that is on the pillow, while with the other hand I search for the watch. The drums seem nearer now; their beats ruffle the hair on the back of my head and slide down into my ears, but sleep has not left me entirely and it is with difficulty that I lift my head to check the time. It is not yet eight and I have already twice repeated these movements in the last twenty minutes, which could well be three hours. Then all at once the beating of drums ceases. The company has concluded its morning march. A bugle is heard three times. After that all is silent, though I now become aware of another sound, that of the old fan rotating above. Fighting the urge to fall back to sleep I turn around and rub my eye with a finger. I can think of nothing as I follow the movements of the fan through the mosquito net that closes on me from all sides – like a room within a room. In my sleep I recall feeling the warmth of a body. But here I lie alone, ignoring the discomfort of a full bladder. I see the road that passes through the forest, its trees yellowish-brown skeletons, their branches bare and rising willy-nilly towards a sky which is white with heat; the earth as far as you can look is covered with dead leaves. It is a landscape at the end of time.