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14th Anniversary Edition, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Seven Nov-Dec 2023.
Orphans, poems by Aziz Azrhai.
Orphans
Perhaps they finally understood
That life is a maze with doors and locks
That wars are a trick of gamblers
On the treasure of deception
That enemies are not all bad
That the truce is a sleeping mine
In the pod of friendships
That bullets are spoils of
Those expelled from the tables of the minority
That the dead are dried-up harvests
In the paddocks of books
That condolences are a monotonous song
The magicians delight in it
Perhaps they finally understood this
Orphans going to school
On a difficult day
Laugh at anyone…
On two banks
The secret we buried
In the last century
Stumbled at its shine
The horses of the antiquities
They came, unlike usual kindness
Armed with instincts
Smells drive them
Where doubt spreads
They were like blind people without goals
Their boats collide with the remains of the strangers
And just as we left our beds
terrified
They were looking back
As if there were lightnings
Guiding their intentions
Until the deposits cool down
In other words
We descended – together – from the tribe of tree cutters
Spread brutality for the bandits
And throw our nets into lands
Without fish
Each of us has his secrets
And the reasons
We forgot our feet in another century
When we were crossing the bridges of disappointment
Towards dictionaries of maps
And we dream of pruning bliss
With scissors that do not cool
We are now on the verge of doubt
And they, like us
On the second bank
Almost nothing has changed
Another day with knives at the back
The same drying faces
On the slopes
Eyes with coffins
And diggers
The softness of intermittent moaning
in rooms
Paved beds
With No speculations
The sheets themselves
And the smells
And the colors
The completion of the emanating delirium
From a continent
In a vessel
Curtains and needles
And the tablets
Wood clogs
Chatters
In the corridors
The same insults
On the margins of the handshake
The flavor of coma in the air bottles
Boil spots on shirts
The sharpness of the voyeuristic look
From a hole
In a wall
Neutrality of strangers
And this same night
Its walls
Without numbers
(…)
Then
Almost nothing has changed:
Nothing
Except these “brown winds”
Which guards the snow fields
In exile for the elderly.
© Aziz Azrhai
Aziz Azrhai (1965) is a Moroccan poet and visual artist. He published eight poetry collections. He, also, held several art exhibitions inside Morocco and outside. In addition, he is a member of the House of Poetry in Morocco and a former official in its executive office.