موقع فواصل موقع ثقافي للشاعرة سعدية مفرح
باللغة الإنجليزية
Saadia Mufarreh
Translated by: Yasmine Seale
You’re not there
but details linger. Who knows how
they trickle in and scurry out,
how they hum like a knot
of sandgrouse caught
in the snare of distance,
laying waste
to silence, that stranger
not to be trusted,
getting the better of love,
that looted thing.
They keen and do not fold
when a flash of the one they like best
across the wilds of their distress
tugs at them with its young
bright ungovernable face.
Your absence sounds the bell
of my presence and fells it.
When you’re not there
my sadness is careful
to draw its limbs
close and under
my surface sinks,
and when you are
it swells and sinks me.
Is there not a strait
between this and that
on whose shores we play
at being not-sad?
You’re not there: here I am
saddling the horse of my doubts.
Your absence
is a quick-tempered river:
when it appears I powder
all the dolls of my desire
into angels of love, and I hang
all the arbours of my heart
with canopies for their sport.
I buff them and dress them
in anklets, I hold them to the light
until they turn to suns
dancing with your tide,
drunk on it, high
and haughty and new,
and strew their pretty henna
birdwise on the water,
and score seven green windows
and light seven green flames,
and their coo rises cracked
and soft as prayer to the haze
of palms rubbed with resin,
with incense and rose,
and the season’s cool ruin.
The anklets are what silvered
your face’s nights, seven times
they call to you.
Will they take over
when my waters recede?
When you’re not there
your absence, being there,
is sweeter,
and when your absence
is not there your being there
is sweeter still. How is it
that being there is absent
and absence ever present,
and absence evanescent?
Memories are
the bruise of not being
there and mine are
not going anywhere
