أميرة الماء — Abdullah Alfaify

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Wave upon wave of love breaks,

and an expanse journeys within its own expanse and sails!

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The sea is my days; their horses trot,

passing as sorrow, showering down as joy!

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All who saw you in the pupils of the waymarks

perceived your love, yet did not see!

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They perceived that the princess of water who

gave you your rain-bearing star has a will that cannot be subdued!

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The Far Maghreb upon her lashes

is an East whose fruit a dark-eyed gaze leads in procession!

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From the falcon at her temple-locks to the wilderness grass,

two fawns, surrounded by the greatest enchantment.

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And over the gulls of her knees fluttered

the yearnings of my days, and the marble swayed!

And on the horizon of time she blazes,

and on the horizon of place she falters.

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History scatters in her desert,

and if she wishes, it is a slave brought before her!

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I ripened, despite the soil, in my desert;

she cried it out—its import a green dawn!

To swathe it, out of her warmth, in a well-built form,

whose arms are the fronds of late afternoons; and she sows.

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The torches of her ecstasy grow heedless in yearning—

her Sufi ecstasy—or the flowering presence awakens.

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He knew the downpour of time from her flanks;

she gave him drink: he neither sobers nor grows drunk!

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"، ، ؟!

O you, the woman who bore the time

of union as a child—where in you is estrangement?!

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You left me prey to poems and visions,

pulled to and fro, passed around, scattered.

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I pour down longing into your soil, and turn back,

from the excess of what is in me, a lovesick wanderer pondering.

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She who thirsted for you has made you thirsty, and

eternity has ended; water is a hidden meaning!

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Is this, then, how my love for you remains an ember

in the soul, dying down at times, or showing itself?!

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How often I said one day, while the air was veils

of white, and a blond wing bore us in flight:

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O God's palm tree, whose breasts are

life's ripe dates, and whose shade bends low!

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Shake my trunk—I hunger for you;

and shower down like a galaxy curling into a sphere!

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I give you my banners, a sail of my blood,

and their threads flow down from my lifeblood!

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May a fabric from them, from their cloud, delight you,

so this dazzling splendor may run riot in it!

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And seize the slogans by their necks, those

that gnawed, within my body, an unfeeling nation!

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This is Palestine, like the longest lie;

her history is Arabs who speak and disbelieve!

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And the Muslims are prayer beads and incense burners,

nations over there—how often they sleep and bellow!

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"" ""!

Baghdad was burned in the "film of Arabism,"

and the two directors are "Americanization" and "dollarization"!

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And the Bedouins belched... America, on

their shoulders, pissed... and their true character showed!

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Those suckling at her breast—were they surprised?

For the "civilization of cows" is more bovine than they!

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:

Shake her trunk toward you; the forenoon gives birth to

two children: a child worthy of its lineage,

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and the other is the child who, in my mind,

has been, for a thousand years, an idea that never grows!

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O you, O us, and what remains upon

the palm of time in our ritual—O threshing floor!

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I know you are in your labor, while

your kin around you are scoffers or deniers!

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I know that you are free and captive,

and all the multitudes surrender themselves as captives to you!

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I know the steed's lowered head when it stumbles,

or the heart's trembling when it is broken!

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And you have known that your heart is a great pearl,

dearer to me than the dearest, and more radiant!

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But femininity's emblem is sunlit,

always, while masculinity's emblem is moonlit!

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Your glances are addressed to my heart's vulnerable places,

if someone other than myself were in me—what a wretched excuse!

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She who killed your heart fashioned

her killer; everything that comes has a source!

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So free yourself from me, for my beginning is in you,

and forgive my love, for one like you forgives!

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None reads the childbearing language except one who

lives motherhood; every mother endures!

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And here, in her whiteness, I discern

the face of sunrise, gaining insight from its book.

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Do not regret, do not dream, and welcome

my yesterday; and the gate of promise is a fruitful morning!

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Do you know what the fingers of my clock read

in your withered face, while cold whistles?

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Two couplets, wrapped in mystery within my head,

cawed, and this universe is a treacherous night:

"

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"If you have no cure from yourself for love,

then your physician is death, which you do not guard against!

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Were it not for death's blood in the hearts of rain,

the dead, desolate water would never grow fertile!"

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O cloud of the final chapter, wait,

for our lips receive al-Kawthar from your two nipples!

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The stubborn memory crumbles in my palm,

and I smell stars breaking free from it!

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She spun the filings of my memories into a maiden

of light, in whom the ages collapse!

She comes upon me, lush in her wildness,

to leave me as a revolt at dusk, or come early.

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I shall keep gazing, thirsty, at her rainless cloud,

which neither clears away from me nor rains!

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It is my fate to love you—you, my enchantress;

who can master the destiny of love!

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How often, like moths, we die in our opposites!

And love after enmity is more poetic!