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Live Encounters Arab Poets in Translation August 2023
What is your hand? poems by Kamal Abdel Hamid.
What is your hand?
Do you remember it?
Your hand that sweats in love
So I click on it with an ambiguous pressure between I love you
And I want you now so you know how much I love you
She did not talk much
She was not afraid of street dogs
She does what she desires
With one touch
Is she still with you?
Your hand that you do not come out with
Always keep it in your closet
For I trained her so long to guard you,
To gracefully leap before the radars, café cameras,
And building guards
To pick grapes and oranges
From the trees of my hands.
We are the two look-alikes who once danced in secret
And when they returned separately to their homes
They did not have two homes anymore
A divine sympathy that is rarely repeated
Now.. What is your hand?
But the ceiling of the room above my bed
As if, it were the hand of God in Michelangelo’s refrigerator
After you
My mother died
I went to the edge of the sea to scream
In order not to kill myself
I threw many things behind my back
I asked the oncologist:
How lethal is the dose?
After you
I mean when it is not your hand
It is obvious that an epidemic will come
Distance Dance
I
Outside a primordial melody follows
Galloping like herds of extinct mammoths
Of dust, trees, air
Distant seawaters
Of Music hidden by the earth
Under its skin
For a moment like this
Inside
I dance a lot more than usual
While I am looking out on free streets
After everyone raised
His eternal shoes off her lungs.
I dance naked
In the cave of (Two Nine One Two… 2912)
A gypsy celebrates the beings of the void
And she experiments with passion
A sudden jump to the stage
And we are in our numbered caves
Watching the loose danger
Immersed in the scents of vinegar and soap
Dried with salt and spices
Like seasonal fish behind the windows
I dance relentlessly high
Whenever I anticipate your existential fear
And when you wash your hands
From everything
Yes.. I mean everything
To pass, according to your intentions
Without sin
Until after the end of the world
I think, with you, as a good lover
Who may excuse viruses
Is not it a curse?
To be invisible?
Shall we not step outside the secret?
Have we never been?
II
This is not the end of the world
As you think
It is not an epidemic followed by hell
Or a paradise
The peak will not reach a reverse explosion
To regain the universe its initial density
But it is a dance of symmetry
A generalization of the same distancing
Which I have experienced many times
And when you smuggle my corpse
Between two cities.
This is how free death encircles us
Not as a holy punishment
Or a collective embodiment of karma
Rather, as a form of love
Forgotten axioms
Maybe nature
An infinitesimal cry
Particles that sing in aerosols:
Every void is a home
Every silence lurks
Every tranquillity bears faces
III
This is a biological refinement of beings
A moving of the fixed towards the abyss
A Temporarily disabling of hands
The rise of popularity of metaphors
Every joint physical action
Is nothing but a gagged craving
There are ready-made alternatives through imagination:
Gesture handshake
The kiss with a look
Survival.. a distance of fear.
I think, and with you,
As lovers, who were not under a cosmic threat
To invent physical distancing
This is not a leaked version of our end
These are the beginnings of what follows
The appearance of forgotten ones
Correspondence of two parallel worlds
– As we are now –
In an intimidating cycle
Of natural law.
IV
So.. Simply
Something is wrapping under our feet
But as potential survivors
We sharpen our nails to resume life
Albeit with less brutality
© Kamal Abdel Hamid
Kamal Abdel Hamid (1965) is an Egyptian journalist, essayist and poet. He has published seven literary books: four poetry collections, a book of essays, a book of texts, and a poetry anthology in English.