Live Encounters Arab Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Five
November- December 2025
My Sorted Follies, poems by Mohamed Hosni Eliwa.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
My Sorted Follies
I walk on electric wires
Like a blind blackbird
I tremble beneath every lamp
And count the faces of the severed
From the foreheads
As if a hymn of a delayed birth
Rises from a burrow beneath memory!
When night retreats like an exhausted army
And silence cracks
Under the weight of sounds that
Have not yet been born
It is fitting that I remain standing
Arranging all the follies on a single table
My follies that have accompanied me for 50 memories
And because I do not intend to wait for 50 more
I say to myself:
“What a life that would be, lived without folly!”
There
On the calcified wall of the room
A pink folly crawls
A folly that means nothing to anyone;
It passes by a man who no longer cares for the world
In the slightest,
Who no longer thinks of seizing a chance to migrate
To the circles of the luxurious humans
And beg for some scraps stuck
In the mouths of their dogs, trained to eat the flesh of my kind
And he runs before them like a thief caught stealing a glance
Through a hole in the towering wall.
I do not prefer the follies that are sold
On the sidewalks, taking a sunbath
Emerging cursed from a church just closed
Kicked by dust-accompanied feet to the temples
Practiced by boys on beaches like sand balls
And, in submission to distributive justice
Her financial integrity is stabbed,
And her reputation is abused improperly.
I realize I am the first of the sent ones
Migrating from the remote kingdom of the Lord
Carrying in my heart storms of sorrows,
In my palm an ember
That ignites in the spaces of cold and absence
Blazes in the darkness of the open space
And is eroded by questions without answers
As if I am the harbinger of perplexity
Or the prophet of a labyrinth.
Echoing in my ears:
“You are the stranger / compelled in your public circumambulation
You are the resident in your exodus – no partner in your return
You are the path
There is no destination but you
And no direction except toward you.”
I became aware that I am the first of the sent ones
As if I am the being’s separation from itself
A traveler between becoming and annihilation
Carrying the legacy of light in the cradle of joys
And searching for the meaning of creation in the fragility of the moment.
In every step, opposites merge within it
I rewrite a cosmic text
I hear in the blowing of the wind
Hymns of things not yet born
And I see in the recesses of the mountains:
The forms of passers-by who have turned to ash,
And every certainty shatters under the tyranny of darkness.
And every certainty shatters under the tyranny of darkness.
And I must realize that I
Was born on the pavement of fortune
Which circles towards my chest, with a lukewarm vengeance;
For nothing is worse than being born at all,
Or for life to mean to you every morning
The ease of return, in the tail of the train,
To a room the size of a shoe’s heel!
Elegy for Water
The water, upon the banks’ flanks:
Was a sea
So we skillfully pierced a hole in it
And ran it over the tongue of the sand.
The water’s coming was not from the water’s own lust
Was the sand not of its own making?
And the water is the master of the two temptations:
Origin / and Salvation
Origin / and Death
Origin / and Immortality
Origin / and Nothingness.
The water did not come from the ribs of the unseen
Nor ascend from the loins of the clouds.
The water
In the manner of the sea
Worships two gods.
And the sea will emerge from its impurity
Believing that the water
Was born from its blue skin
Was born on the pavement of a road
And the midwife suckled it
What ripens at weaning:
Ebb and flow.
The sea is no longer
As it was in its childhood
Sneaking secretly from its parents
From its bedroom which
Forces it to scream like a rabbit
It wishes it were a mouse
With teeth that cut the shores’ trap
And spreads in the open air
The sails of the blind boats.
The water which began to wither
Found no one to care for it
And give it drink.
© Mohamed Hosni Eliwa
Mohamed Hosni Eliwa (b. 1977) is an Egyptian poet and writer. He is the author of three poetry collections and holds memberships in both the Cairo Writers Association and the Arab League for Literature and Culture.
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.