كتاب التحولات والهجرة في أقاليم الليل والنهار

by Adonis, أدونيس

Ali Ahmad Said was born in 1930 in a Syrian village overlooking the Mediterranean. As a boy he was schooled at home by his father, a peasant respected in the neighborhood for his exceptional learning. By him the future poet (who at seventeen adopted his pen name Adonis) was very early introduced to the language of the Koran and to the great figures of classical Arab culture. After the French lycee in Tartus and university studies in Damascus came a term of military service, half of which he spent in prison for political activities. In 1956, with his wife, Adonis made his way to Beirut, and in 1960 chose to become a Lebanese citizen. With Yussef el-Khal he founded the influential review Chir. In 1980 Adonis accepted a post of associate professor at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle; from 1984 dates the masterful series of lectures on Arab poetics given at the College de France. Poet, editor, translator and literary critic, Adonis is the author of over twenty books; his poems and prose have been translated into French, Spanish, English, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, German. On two occasions he has been a Nobel finalist. Describing Adonis as "the poet of the beyond, of restlessness and questioning, a seeker after the eternal moment of freshness and the time of possibilities, " the critic Kamal Abu Deeb goes on to say: "Both as a theorist and a poet, Adonis is the writer with the greatest influence in Arabic poetry today [...]Sophisticated, enidite, widely read in Arabic and European literature, with a deep understanding of Arabic culture and the forces which have shaped it[...], he has a dazzling linguistic flair and power. A rebel and force of destruction, but also a force of positive rejection andwith a tormenting love for his culture and his country, he is certainly one of the greatest poets in the history of the language."

Genres: Poetry, Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Adonis was born Ali Ahmed Said in the village of Al Qassabin in Syria, in 1930, to a family of farmers, the oldest of six children. At the age of nineteen, he adopted the name Adonis (also spelled Adunis), after the Greek god of fertility, with the hopes that the new name would result in newspaper publication of his poems.

Although his family could not afford to send Adonis to school, his father taught him to read poetry and the Qu'ran, and memorize poems while he worked in the fields. When he was fourteen, Adonis read a poem to the president of Syria who was visiting a nearby town. The impressed president offered to grant a request, to which the young Adonis responded that he wanted to attend school. The president quickly made arrangements for Adonis to attend a French-run high school, after which he studied philosophy at Damascus University.

In 1956, after a year-long imprisonment for political activities, Adonis fled Syria for Beirut, Lebanon. He joined a vibrant community of artists, writers, and exiles in Beirut, and co-founded and edited Sh'ir, and later Muwaqaf, both progressive journals of poetry and politics. He studied at St. Joseph University in Beirut and obtained his Doctorat d'Etat in 1973.

Considered one of the Arab world's greatest living poets, Adonis is the author of numerous collections, including Mihyar of Damascus (BOA Editions, 2008), A Time Between Ashes and Roses (Syracuse University Press, 2004); If Only the Sea Could Sleep (2003); The Pages of Day and Night (2001); Transformations of the Lover (1982); The Book of the Five Poems (1980); The Blood of Adonis (1971), winner of the Syria-Lebanon Award of the International Poetry Forum; Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1961), Leaves in the Wind (1958), and First Poems (1957). He is also an essayist, an editor of anthologies, a theoretician of poetics, and the translator of several works from French into Arabic.

Over the course of his career, Adonis has fearlessly experimented with form and content, pioneering the prose poem in Arabic, and taking a influential, and sometimes controversial role in Arab modernism. In a 2002 interview in the New York Times, Adonis declared: '"There is no more culture in the Arab world. It's finished. Culturally speaking, we are a part of Western culture, but only as consumers, not as creators."

Adonis's awards and honors include the first ever International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award, and the Highest Award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels. He was elected as Stephen Mallarme Academy Member in Paris in 1983. He has taught at the Lebanese University as a professor of Arabic literature, at Damascus University, and at the Sorbonne. He has been a Lebanese citizen since 1961 and currently lives in Paris.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/...

Reviews

[Jibran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adonis, the name that shows up on potential Nobel winner lists every year but never makes it. He is old and and has one foot in the grave already (perhaps he's even dead, I don't know), and with Nobel being suspended in 2018 and possibly in 2019 it doesn't look likely that Adonis would ever get it. But that is all besides the point. Who cares about Nobel anymore after what they did to themselves these last few years? Adonis's poetry will live on in the hearts and minds of Syrians, Arab readers, and those of us who read him in translation.

I live in the face of a woman
who loses me
so she can be
the lighthouse waiting
in my mad and navigating blood.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adonis says that the Arab poet lives between two exiles: the internal one and the external one or between two hells: the I and the Other.
"The I is not I, nor is it the Other.
Absence and exile constitute the only presence."
He hopes for some promise of a beginning from a poetry and at the same time doubts if it is possible between two exiles when he is prevented from being himself and when he even doesn't live for the Other. He feels that poetry is as if moving to the language and image of death, where both I and the Other discover their deaths.



My eyes are tired, tired of days,
tired regardless of days.
Still, must I drill
through wall after wall
of days to seek another day
Is there? Is there another day?
*
Stricken by the cancer of silence,
I scrawl my poems in the sand
with a crow's feather.
My eyes see nothing but lashes —
no love, no sea,
no wisdom but the earth.

With springs of dust in my blood
I sit all day in this cafe
and wait for someone
to remember me.
*
Memory is a needle
that stitches a carpet of words like threads

[nour · Rating 4 out of 5]

أدونيس أيها العبقري المجنون ..........
شاعر الحداثة العربي ..... الذي يغفله العرب ويهتم به الغرب ....

[Hind · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When I saw death on a road,
I saw my face in his.
My thoughts resembled locomotives
straining out of fog
and into fog.
Suddenly I felt akin
to a lighting
or a message
scratched in dust."

[zakariah · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOAHHHH i luv history i love turning my history degree into an english degree

[Sookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of my favorite lines:

Listen!
I'm calling you to recognize my voice
-- The Messenger

Leave me alone.
A light has always
led me home.
-- In the forest

The pitying stars ignite
and days forget themselves
in my bed
-- The pages of day and night

We scream.
We dream of weeping,
but tears refuse our eyes.
We twist our necks
in zero hurricanes.
-- Elegy for the time at hand

Shall I say now: "I am not myself."
Shall I say: "I have created ashes."
-- Gilgamesh

Every poem in this collection is quotable. Almost all of them are tinged with a bit of melancholy and longing. There are moments of absolute silence and then there are screams of despair echoing from the empty streets. This collection is structurally beautiful.

[Harry Palacio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arabic poets seem to write into the night they’ll pen a stone of stars, their paper rungs of sand- Adonis compares himself to K Gibran and for a moment you believe him

[Sandro]

THE PASSAGE
I sought to share
the life of snow and fire.
But neither
snow nor fire took me in.
So
I kept my peace,
waiting like flowers,
staying like stones.
In love I lost
myself.
I broke away
and watched until
I swayed like a wave
between the life
I dreamed and the changing
dream I lived.




TREE OF FIRE
The tree by the river
is weeping leaves.
It strews the shore
with tear after tear.
It reads to the river
its prophecy of fire.
I am that final
leaf that no one
sees.
My people
have died as fires
die-without a trace.



THE CAPTIVE
Imprisoned by the buds and grass,
I build an island in my mind
by weaving branches from a shore.
Harbors dissolve. Black lines
unweave themselves. I pass

between the barriers and springs
of light that made my dream.
I feel the jailed astonishment
of every butterfly that falters
in a fluttering of dying wings.



THE CALL
My morning love,
meet me in the sad field.
Meet me on the road
where the dried trees
shielded us like children
under their dried shadows.

Do you see the branches?
Do you hear the call
of the branches?
Their young shoots are words
that strengthen my eyes
with a strength
that can split stone.

Meet me. Meet me,
as if we had already dressed
and come and knocked
on the woven door of darkness,
parted a curtain,
flung windows open
and retreated to the sinuosities
of branches
as if we had poured
from the brims of our eyelids
such dreams, such tears—
as if we had stayed
in a country of branches
and never chose to return.



IN THE FOREST
Leave me alone.
Let birds come.
Let stones be laid on stones.
Leave me alone.
I waken streets
when I walk through processions
of trees.
Under branches
I remember journeys
when I rose to foreign
suns and let the morning
seal my secrets.
Leave me alone.
A light has always
led me home.
A voice is always calling.


THE PAGES OF DAY AND NIGHT•••
Before the time of day—l am.
Before the wonder of the sun-l burn.
Trees run behind me.
Blossoms walk in my shadow.
But still tomorrow
builds into my face
such island fortresses
of silence that words find
not a door to enter by.
The pitying stars ignite
and days forget themselves
in my bed.
•The springs within my chest
are closing now like blossoms
to the moon.•
Their waters bathe
the mirror of my vision pure
as silence as I waken into sleep.


A TREE
I carry no sword.
've never sculpted a head
In summer and winter
I am a bird fleeing
in a torent of hunger
to an empty nest.
My kingdom is a road
of water.
In every absence I am present.
In pain or shyness,
in rain or dryness,
far or near—
I possess the light of things.
And when I go,
I close the door of the earth
behind me.


A MIRROR FOR MY BODY IN LOVE
When my body loves,
it melts the day in its tornado.
Perfumes come
to its bed where dreams
vanish like incense
and, like incense, return.
The songs of grieving children
are the songs my body sings.
Lost, bewildered on a dream
of bridges, I ignore
the soaring road that crosses me
from shore to shore.



A DREAM FOR ANY MAN
I live in the face of a woman
who lives in a wave-
a surging wave
that finds a shore
lost like a harbor under shells.
I live in the face of a woman
who loses me
so she can be
the lighthouse waiting
in my mad and navigating blood.



4.
Why call me man?
That's not my name.
Why bother with identity?
Just say I live
in the closed drum of space.
If you must say something, say that.
5.
With echoes for neighbors we will die together
and live in the shadow of seasons, in dust,
in the open book of prairies, in grass we trampled once and signed with our footprints.
We will stay like relics of our kind for our kind—
reminders, shadows, echoes of echoes.



THE STAGE AND RHE MIRRORS

1. A dream of Death
When I saw death on a road
I saw my face in his
My thoughts resembled locomotives
straining out of fog
and into fog.
Suddenly I felt akin
to lightning
or a message
scratched in dust

2. A Dream of the Sea

Mihyar is a poem
to wound the night of the tomb
with light
as brightly as the sun unveils
the face of the sea,
wave by
wave by
wave.

3. A Dream of Poetry

I hear the voice of time in poems,
in the touch of hands, here, there,
in eyes that ask me
if the eglantine shall shut
the door of its hut
or open another.


…a touch if hands, here, there
and the gap from infancy
to immolation disappears
as if a star emerged
at once
from nowhere
and returned the world
to innocence


MOUNT SUNEEN
From his room in the sky
my mountain
reads
to the night
to the trees,
to all who cannot sleep—
his high sorrows.


THE TRAVELER
The glass shade of my lamp
reflects me
even after I'm gone.
My gospel is denial,
and my map-
a world I've yet to make.


THE SONG•
Strangled mute
with syllables,
voiceless,
with no language
but the moaning
of the earth,

my song discovers death
in the sick joy
of everything that is
for anyone who listens.
Refusal is my melody.
Words are my life,
and lite is my disease.

—

2.

Stricken by the cancer of silence,
I scrawl my poems in the sand
with a crow's feather.
My eyes see nothing but lashes
no love, no sea,
no wisdom but the earth.

With springs of dust in my blood
I sit all day in this cafe
and wait for someone
to remember me.

I want to pray on my knees
to owls with splintered wings,
to embers,
to the winds,
to slaughterhouses and a thousand drunkards,
to stars hidden at the sky's center,
to death by pestilence.

I want to burn the incense
of my days, my songs, my book,
my ink and my inkwell.
I want to pray
to gods that never heard of prayer.

Beirut is invisible.
Nothing blossoms on its mountains,
and nothing blooms on mine.
In the month of figs and apples,
locusts shall devour my fields.

Barren and alone in orchards,
in sun and after sun,
I walk Beirut and never see it.
I claim Beirut and cannot flee it.
As the day passes, I pass,
but I am elsewhere.



5.

Rejection's banners guard
me as I weave these words,
but in my face another
marriage has begun.
I call
the earth my wife.
I free
my captive flesh and bow I
to lightning as a friend.
I bathe
my wounds in thunder.
I murder
that charlatan, the moon.
I ride
a salamander's back abroad
and breathe embers.
Each scorpion
becomes a country in itself.
A frog wears history's mask.
A beggar keeps the books
of glory.

Yet, I feel
such rage here on the earth's
backbone, learning the sweetness
of all hidden and forbidden
things.
I scrawl the history
of time's beginnings.
While
the sun's nail nicks
my check, I mate the languages
of rain and ink.
I let
Cain feel proud of his grandson.



ELEGY IN EXILE
Phoenix,
when the flames enfolded you,
what pen were you holding?
What feathers sprouted
when your old ones burned?
Buried in your own ashes,
what world did you confront,
what robe did you don,
what color did you choose?
Tell me.
Tell me what silence follows
the final silence
spun from the very fall of the sun?
What is it, phoenix?
Give me a word,
a sign.
Your banishment and mine
are one.
Your banishment and mine
and the banishment of heroes
are one.
Your banishment and mine
and the banishment of heroes
and the banishment of love and glory
are one.
What is it we love or fear
but shadows of ourselves?
When I recall your suffering,
my phoenix,
I forget my own.
No mother held you
when you left
until you burned for breath.
No father blessed your exile
in his heart
before you saw it born
in flame with each horizon.
I've left.
I've left my mother.
I've left my mother
on a mat of straw
to grieve my going.
Astray, I swallow dust.
I, who learned love
from my father's eyes,
have left my father's house
to be the prodigal.
I am a hunted bird.
I steal my bread.
All I see is desolation.
Pursued by falcons,
my small wings lose their feathers,
feather by feather.
"They say my song is strange
because it has no echo.
They say my song is strange
because I never dreamed myself
awake on silks.
They say I disbelieved the prophesies,
and it was true,
and it is still and always true."
My phoenix,
I learn with you
the banishment that murders me
in ruins and the sheerest voids.
I break from jail
to seek the man I keep becoming.
I leave the gate ajar,
the chain empty,
and the darkness of my cell
devours me like eyes in shadow.

Though banished,
I love all those who banished me,
who crowned my brow with chains
and waited to betray me.
I see my childhood
like an isolated Baalbek
with its longing pillars,
and I burn.
Horizon by horizon,
I am born to the chants of the sun.

My new wings grow
like yours, my phoenix.
Phoenix, we are born for death,
and death in life
deserves its springs and harvests,
its rivering Jesus,
its passion with the vineyard
and the mount.
But it is not all solitude
and echoes from the grave.

Phoenix, I remember one
who perished on a cross—
extinguished
He burned in pools of cherry
like fire within fire
extinguished.
Yet from the dark of the ashes
he glows.
His wings are numbered
with the flowers of our land,
with all the days of all the years,
with pebbles and the merest stones.

Like you, my phoenix,
he survived our hunger,
and his mercy feeds us.

Dying with his wings outspread,
he gathered all who buried
him in ashes
and became, like you,
the spring and fire of our agony.
Go now, my sweet bird,
show me the road I'll follow.




TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE LOVER•••

"Women are your garments, and you are theirs." The Koran
"The body is the dome of the soul."
St. Gregoire Palamas

1.
•. Faster than the air I rai
eneath the jailing sky until I disappeared in darkness
The wind kept calling me by name.
I heard the echo of an old man's voice:
"You will discover a mountain filled with your necessities.
It will protect you and grant you victory."
Then I heard a voice from within the mountain:
"Pull aside the curtain and enter."
I entered the mountain as through a window ...
A hand beckoned me toward an ageless place that glowed in the light.
A bed awaited me there, and on it lay an image with breasts and thighs and all the rest.
I awoke beside a woman who became my other nature,
and that nature flowered suddenly like poppies or plants.
Male and temale it flowered.
My body started to prepare itself for something like the fall of planets.

2.
Her body grew north, south, east, west.
It grew upward to new depths.
Like a spring she welcomed me, and like a tree she surrendered to me.
Suspended in my dream,
I kept imagining my dream into the world, inventing secrecies to fill the flaws of all my days.
I burned against her like an ember.

My lips and fingers were pens on her flesh.
I memorized her in every alphabet and memorized my memories until they multiplied.
My sighs were clouds that made their own horizons.
I wove her a robe from the sun.
The light of midnight traveled me to her.
I hid in the folds of her robe.
We learned the world together.
At the sound of doorbells we disappeared.
I sat beside her while she read.
I slept like tears between the lashes of her eyes.
Suddenly I lost sight of her.
She was everywhere I'd never been.
Her garments and her seasons became my pathway to her.
We knifed our names it treetrunks.
We rolled downhill like stones.
We sang with trees,
and the earth was like the fruit of love for us.
Clouds were our friends.
Stonehouses understood us.
The memory of daylight disappeared behind us.
In Qasyun she emerged like incense, and I swayed in the scent of her shy and intimate taste.
3.
We woke to the bitter threads of dawn that changed into people and mosses from the sea.

Our eyelids tightened like knots.
The sunlight striped and bannered our bodies before it flamed across our pillows.
Our eyelids tightened into harder knots.
The dawn ordered the night to awaken.
My body was a vessel I shared with her.
I discovered with the map of sex a new earth, and I advanced toward it.
1 disguised my path with riddles and signs that vaporized in my delirium like tattoos of fire.
I was a wave advancing toward her shore.
Her back was a continent, and the world's compass hid beneath her breasts.
I enclosed her as if I were the branches of a tree.
We telt between us a power like the wings of a thousand eagles.
I listened to her at passion's brink ... the sigh of her waist, the surge of her hips.
Overcome, I entered the desert of panic and whispered her name.
I descended lower and lower until I reached her narrower world where fire and tears were one and the same.
I watched the wonder of all I saw until I was drunk with seeing.
The lord of the flesh spoke to me.
Three hundred and sixty-five days encircled me.
I made homes of every day, made beds in every home and slept in every bed.

(When love's hour begins,
the moon and the sun are the same.)
She bore me like a river. heard another languag
hat turned into gardens, stones, waves, more wave and flowers with supernatural thorns as the lord of the flesh commanded.
•••"My beloved, whose body I have scriptured with love's pen, do what you will with me.
Stop and speak
until you sunder me and free my treasures.
If I am static as the stars, re-order me.
If I am higher than the clouds
or lower than a spring on any mountain's peak remain beneath me.•••
I see your face in every other face.
You are the sun that travels neither east nor west.
You neither wake nor sleep.
You are my resurrection and my fall.
You seam my sorrows.
You let my meteoring verses be the death of thorns.
You let me hold like wind the very planets in my hand until they're purifed and lost
No wonder 1 assault you with my heart and know you, pore by pore.
Why?
Because your whispering invites me."
In bed or on the ground itself we planted saplings of the flesh.
We hid in conversation long enough to make a new epiphany.

Her body was mine, and mine was hers.
We were transformed into each other.
The architecture of our joints, the pulse in the limbs, the pure geometry of muscles
and the glory of the act that bound us, navel to navel, contractions of the flesh, descent and ascent, plateaus and flights and waves,
her waist like a floor of stars and half-stars and volcanoes and embers
and the waterfalls of twin desires ...
Afterward, we hid like twins in shadow where the galaxy of sex was king.
We lay transformed.
Her breasts were night and day to me.
Standing, we felt between us an opening of frontiers.
No longer captives of ourselves,
we started the clock of the sun we stopped together.
We let it summon fruit and flowers with its light.
We seemed more quietly alive.
We saw a new earth blossoming with trees planted by the lord of the flesh.
4.
In the sea of love or on the winds of love and fate we were enthroned like a living book of flesh on the world's weight.
Our each body was a water-carried dome borne toward the seventh heaven..
"Beloved, what do you see?"
"I see a knight who says that nothing I desire cannot be mine.
We sowed wheat seeds and told them to grow,

and they grew and were harvested.
We said, 'Be husked.' And they were husked.
We said, 'Be ground!' And they were ground.
We said, 'Be baked.' And they were baked.
•••And when we saw that everything we wanted we received, we feared and awoke,
and we shared the same pillow."•••
"And you, my lover, what did you see?"
"Children before a wind ablaze with meteors."
"What else?"
"A slope that moved and changed into a pregnant gazelle."
"What else?"
"The two of us together on a ship.
We embraced, and the ship shattered.
We clung to a spar that saved us.
Lying on it, you gave birth.
•••You said, 'I'm thirsty'
I knew that I could give you nothing but the sea to drink.•••
Then I saw a spirit in the sky who offered me a flask.
After you drank, I drank as well, and the water was honey."
The spirit vanished, saying, 'I will leave love to you and return to the kingdom of the air.'
My body turned into a new horizon, and my limbs were palm trees….

[Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

i want love like this period

[Sondos Al-Ismail · Rating 3 out of 5]

لغة أدونيس في الكتابة دائماً ما تشدني وتتحدى قارئها.. قدرته على خلق من الشعرِ قصة هو إبداع بذاته.

كما قال:
"إنّ شعري لغة الأرض هناك
وأنا الريحُ هنا والمطرُ"

[casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Do you see the branches? Do you hear the call of the branches?”

“...as if we had poured from the brims of our eyelids such dreams, such tears...”

“‘But how, how did you marry me?’
‘My body came to you like the wind colored by the earth itself. Like planets of wind we loved.’”

“Let’s plunge into the deep again, my love, and leave to others the height and breadth of all the other kingdoms of the air.”

“...the languages of exile are not the sun’s languages. I have thus become a wanderer...”

These are only a select few quotes from a endless assortment that I came to adore. Adonis leaves behind a beautiful imprint, a memory that is not easily shaken with his way of language that is unique to him. Or to quote him, he leaves his memory trembling between our arms. It is the kind of loveliness that one can always return to, like a friend. Before I read this book I did not see the branches, but I now hear the call of them.

[cha! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adonis has bold ways to capture emotion so they come up raw yet fulfilling to the most. I keep on gasping! my favorite must be the way he could capture the nuance of silence shared. I have a little hard time digesting his poems about the city, aside from it is being long continual it has big imagery that I still yet cannot compete with. Would love to read more of his perspective about women.

[M. Ashraf · Rating 3 out of 5]

كتاب التحولات و الهجرة في أقاليم الليل و النهار
أدونيس

استكمالا للأعمال الشعرية الكاملة لأدونيس
بعد أغاني مهيار الدمشقي
الكتاب قصير، مجموعة من القصائد في جمل قصيرة و أحيانا ابيات من كلمة واحدة
اللغة جميلة
و تطور عن الكتاب الماضي
إلى ديوات المسرح و المرايا

[luana · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I’m grateful for time which bears me in its arms and erases every road I’ve taken.” this man is genius in every poem he writes

[aphrodite · Rating 3 out of 5]

3*5

[Farhan Khalid · Rating 4 out of 5]

My eyes are tired, tired of days

Must I drill through wall after wall

Of days to seek another day?


The presence of cities

Passed between the lashes

Of our eyes


O cities of rejection, come!

Discover us!


My people have died as fires die —

Without a trace


I build an island in my mind


In every absence I am present


And when I go

I close the door of the earth

Behind me


I live in the face of a woman

Who lives in a wave


O my dreams, my dancers

Come in, come in

Salute the now and here


I hear the voice of time in poems

In the touch of hands, here, there


I dream of falling in space…

I live surrounded by colors


My gospel is denial

And my map —

A world I've yet to make


Death flutes in my throat

I crown my heart with a feather

On the dirt of oblivion my steps shall grow

My life has been one tour of terror

Tonight the dove of farewell burns in my heart


I call the earth my wife


My country is abandoned

My soul has left me

I have no home


The earth survives beneath my feet

My poems bloom naked as roses

Despair is still my star

Evil is always being born

Silence rises on the sand


I write in flames

Your words are sins of a fall


I look at you and dream of snow

I look at you and wait for autumn


I mimic nonsense

I create nothing

I break rules and create rules


Her body grew north, south, east, west

It grew upward to new depths

Suspended in my dream

I kept imagining my dream into the world

Inventing secrecies to fill the flaws of all my days


My lips and fingers were pens on her flesh

I memorized her in every alphabet

And memorized my memories until they multiplied


You are the sun that travels neither east nor west

You are my resurrection and my fall


When you desired me, you let me create you


Each day's an open book

That we write with our eyes


You are a secret beyond dreams

You are love beyond the heart itself

You are all women in one, all lovers in one


Is love the only place unvisited by death?

A space divides my from myself

Where death and love await me


I dreamed I washed the earth

Until it glistened like a mirror

I walled it with clouds and fenced it with fire

I held it in my hands and doomed it with tears


If I were a candle

I would experience the passing of time


I love what I am and hate my love for it

Is there another way I can create this world?


To be an exile is my identity


You were killed because you were the future


Memory is a needle

That stitches a carpet of words like threads

Over the face of Beirut


He wrote a poem that killed him


Chaos… Voice…

The cities shatter

The earth is nothing but dust

Only one thing can unify them — love

[Myhte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I write in a language that exiles me.

The Other is neither past nor future, nor is it a mirror that is capable of returning the I to childhood.
Rather it helps to set the poet in motion towards the unknown, towards everything strange. The Other seems to be the salvation of the I.

from the sea's floor
my heart sets sail
my eyes remember oceans

we learned defeat beneath
the flags of dust. graveyards
bloomed from our faces. we wrote
our testaments in famine. not
a star glimmered above us
we scouted the sand for ghosts
we searched the caves of wind
and tears. O god we seek
some shelter in the earth
let rivers hide us
from the final enemy

sprawled in the ashes of our days
we glimpse our souls passing

you are a branch in leaf
a voyage that drowns each day

they wore as crowns the consecrations of our lives, the stars rained spittle on us in God's name, in the name of God we sailed those years on broken wings

O light that guides the clouds
O Lord whose goodness never sleeps

[Imen Benyoub · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are a lake.
I am a willowtrunk spearing your earth.
I cast anchor at your shore.
Your waist is my anchorage.
You are all women in one, all lovers in one.

I live in the face of a woman
who lives in a wavea
surging wave
that finds a shore
lost like a harbor under shells.
I live in the face of a woman
who loses me
so she can be
the lighthouse waiting
in my mad and navigating blood.

The solitude of winter
and the passing of summer
are linked by the bridge of spring.

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adonis is the poet of the human body and all her sensations, senses and junctures, mixteries and recombinations. Anyone can love anyone, Adonis's poems prove this and provide the fertile soil for soul partners and lovers to merge and emerge in ecstasy and sober. Read Adonis to complete yourself as a human

[Hafidha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some beautiful stuff in here .... powerful imagery. He likes to use woman as metaphor which is interesting, not sure how I feel about it. But he's a master of poetry, for sure. My first Adonis book but will read others.

[Walid]

it's hard for me to review a book that i know i should be reading in its original language.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adonis never fails me.

[Inverted · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me everywhere. Whew. I must read it again.

[عبلة جابر · Rating 4 out of 5]

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