Status Updates From The Butterfly's Burden

The soldiers measure the distance between being and nonbeing
with a tank’s scope ...

We measure the distance between our bodies
and mortar shells ... with the sixth sense

Here, by upslopes of smoke, on the house steps
there is no time for time,
we do what ascenders to Allah do:
forget pain

Life.
Life in its entirety,
life with its shortcomings,
hosts neighboring stars
that are timeless ...
and immigrant clouds
that are placeless.
And life here wonders:
How do we bring it back to life!

no night in our artillery-glistened night
our enemies are sleepless,
and our enemies ignite the light for us
in the blackness of shelters

by the downslope of hills, facing the sunset
and time's muzzle,
near gardens with severed shadows,
we do what the prisoners do,
and what the unemployed do:
we nurture hope

wishing for the present tense a foothold / on the pavement...

(To a killer:) If you’d contemplated the victim’s face
and thought, you would have remembered your mother in the gas
chamber, you would have liberated yourself from the rifle’s wisdom
and changed your mind: this isn’t how identity is reclaimed!

Our weight has become light like our houses
in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange
creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened
from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do ... what
will we do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?

هو الوقت يفعل ما تفعل الشمس
والريحُ : يَصْقُلُنا ثم يقتلنا حينما
يحمل العقل عاطفة القلب، أو
عندما يبلغ القلب حكمته

It is time that does what sun
and wind do: it polishes us then kills us whenever
the mind bears the heart’s passion, or
whenever the heart reaches its wisdom

في الحصار، تكون الحياة هي الوقت
بين تذكر أولها
ونسيان آخرها.....
In siege, life becomes the time
between remembering life’s beginning
and forgetting its end ...

When the fighter planes disappear, the doves fly
white, white. Washing the sky’s cheek
with free wings, reclaiming splendor and sovereignty
of air and play. Higher and higher
the doves fly, white white. I wish the sky
were real (a man passing between two bombs told me)

أيها الواقفون على العتبات ادخلواء
وإشربوا معنا القهوة العربية
اقد تَشْعُرُونَ بأنكُم بَشَر مثلنا
أيها الواقفون على عتبات البيوت
اخرجوا من صباحاتنا
نطمئن إلى أننا
بشر مثلكم


You standing at the doorsteps, enter
and drink Arabic coffee with us
(you might sense you’re human like us)
you standing at the doorsteps of houses,
get out of our mornings,
we need reassurance that we
are human like you!

...لا ليل في ليلنا المتلأليء بالمدفعية
أعداؤنا يسهرون
وأعداؤنا يشعلون لنا النور
في حلكة الأقبية.
...no night in our artillery-glistened night
our enemies are sleepless,
and our enemies ignite the light for us
in the blackness of shelters

يقيس الجنود المسافة بين الوجود
وبين العدم
بمنظار دبابة.....
The soldiers measure the distance between being
and nonbeing
with a tank’s scope ...

ربما كان هذا الحنين طريقتنا في البقاء
ورائحة العشب بعد المطر

Maybe this longing is our way of surviving
and the smell of grass after rain

Who am I
behind the city wall? No mother kneads my long
hair with her eternal henna, and no sister
braids it. Who am I outside the wall between
neutral fields and an ashen sky. Be
my mother in the stranger's land. And take me
gently to who I become tomorrow

Echo in echo, and I moved into you
as a name moves from one creature to another.
We were two strangers in two faraway lands a while ago,

I am who saw his tomorrow when he saw you