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Live Encounters Arab Poets in Translation August 2023
La cumparsita, poems by Sameh Mahgoub.
La cumparsita
The gloomy woman
That leaves
Her hair loose
Like rumors
Is yawning boredom
Whenever she encounters
A cold morning
Behind the window
The scandal woman
Is sleeping
And sitting
And standing
And running
And fugitive
From the nothing
The woman who sees
And never seen
The girl child
That gets older
On her braids
And never grow old
The uncontrolled
Like a stray bullet
The soft as a knife
The hunting as the idea
The rose woman
If the fragrance dismounts
And walked in the streets
In a hurry
If the flute cries
Secretly of kissing
The Spinning woman
How many appointments
She missed
And how much did she send
And how much did she postpone
And how many horses
Of metaphors
She saddled
And how many and how many
I told about her
And still
From the short chapters
A … N….. A…..y
Myself
It is as if you are just going out
From the legend
It is as if I am there
Taking care of moles
In the gardens of Babylon
Wiping the sun off
Your brown hair
And fly butterflies between your breasts
And read for passers-by
The short chapters from the holy book
How to your nipples
To sleep outside the text
How to edges
To live without memory
And for the memories
To betray the images
How to dreams
To be completed like this
Without a night
And clouds and rain
How to stone
To fall
Like this on a stone
The Kingdom is yours
And the hills
And pastures that did not sleep
And the moles
As they cry between my lips
On the slope
Intertextuality
From a naïve wave
– Between Transient –
On the train station
Love is born
From the entanglement
Of strange feet
In the crowd
Love is born
From the electricity of
Two palms touching
Unintentionally
Love is born
From the femininity of amber
Rolling
On the stairs of the soul
Till the stream of the breasts
Love is born
Love is born.
Innocent of the truth
And certainty
And fear
Born incomplete
And guilty
And sad
Between splendor and modesty
Between the rain umbrella
And the rain
Between the edges and the danger
Between the raging of two voices in the echo
Between echo and echo
Love is born on a journey
Between us – as between the roads and the returnees –
A promise and stories
And a time which is still
Between us
This evening
And these streets
And that coincidence
And that long corridor
Between two years
They go up
Without a desire
The ladder of Hope
© Sameh Mahgoub
Sameh Mahgoub is an Egyptian poet who graduated from the Faculty of Dar Al Uloom .He participated in many major poetic and cultural events inside and outside Egypt including: Tunisia, Morocco, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Algeria, Jordan. In addition, He participated in the jury committees of state awards, as well as obtaining a number of awards and honors, including: the shield of the Prince of Poets Ahmed Shawky, the Al-Babtain Award, for his poem “On the Rhythm of His Laughter He Walks”, the Atheer Award for Arabic Poetry for his poem “I Write to Defeat My Death”. He issued a number of poetry collections, including: “Nothing Equals the Sadness of the River”, “Digging with One Hand”, “The Metaphor of Water”, and “The Wind Explains Its Travels”, and some of his poems have been translated into French, English, Russian, and Spanish.