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Live Encounters Gaza Poetry & Writing, January 2024
South of speech, poem Abdel Wahab Al-Melaweh.
South of speech
That path knows us well
The distance between the jump and the bottom of the gutter
The distance between the ink and what the white Objects imagine
The similarity between the aid shed of the Arab and The last supper
The tear of the jugular vein to hang the wash of the Mirage
Fragments of the soul traps illusion
The matter is not related to loss
It is not related to our sorrows either
Funerals will pass through our blood and fires will also pass.
It does not matter
There is a cactus growing in the house
Boys are celebrating the metaphysics of death
It is okay and there’s nothing wrong
It is the habit of strangers to check the pulse of the sidewalk
with the glow of wine’s sighs
Leave death to grow beautifully among us and pass Near the river
and the water will give you
The secret of its prophecy
Leave your worries or concerns to him
Let him spoil the walk of the air
Prepare feasts for us at a crossroads in the country In the name of the soil
Due to the chaos of leaving for a homeland
That is the first crossroads
Stop worrying about us
You have our patience;
And
We have the salt of our ordeal!
We are going
The darkness of the air illuminates the remaining paths for us
Time has spoiled
We have nothing to do with words
Our sadness will occupy us on the road
The wind will disturb us
We would not arrive now or in two days
Access does not matter
It does not matter if our brothers unite against us
We have other concerns
And we have no other reason to stay
What remains push us outside the spirit
Outside our bodies
Outside the traitorous cities
We are going out into a state of melancholy Drunkard with longing
To a country that ends as a flower in the morning
And grows as freedom in the evening
We will pass the absence of silence
Preceded by the dream of the martyr’s dawn
And the chaos of climbing the mountain of desires
And laughter precedes us
And our children’s feasts
And cypress battalions overlook eternity
We pass through the night, a wound that glows from Our nakedness
They all left us here at death’s crossroads
We know that going to war means giving up ink Love, and sea
What about us and love
What did the poem’s question add to the blood
Yesterday
The wave took off his coat and walked with us
We did not say we were going
We have two enemies in the country that Complement us
One possesses our conduct with the stick of custom
Another takes away our pride
And our glow with the hand of fear
We did not go
But we are incapable of dreaming
We follow a shadow without hope
We have a future in the maze
The river knows its springs in us
Despite the walls of fire around us
And the blindness of truth
The storms are here
– in the south –
It is the compass
Out of time behind stillness
Description of neutrality/
The road to neighing is long
And we need to arrive early in the morning so that The dew is with us
Before the sun extinguished the glow of his cheers
The wandering birds can now go beyond the Distance of this sky
With the wings of pain so that the color of the air Can be freed
From ready-made boxes
And from the traitorous cities
Out of fear
Through the last passage into a cloud
The heart imprisoned the light of her hands
For fear of killing its worn out rhythm by the night
What’s the matter with us and love
We have nothing to do with battles made by emotion
We are going to the end of the road
The afterlife of the impossible
To a direction in the distance between the threads of rain and the lightnings of stone
Come out of the sobbing of the Spirit within us
We have left to you your Lord and His teachings
Your Lord is not my Lord
War has nothing to do with the unseen.
© Abdel Wahab Al-Melaweh
Abdel Wahab Al-Melaweh (1961) is a Tunisian poet, translator, and novelist who has published more than ten poetry collections, two novels, and several critical studies.