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Live Encounters Gaza Poetry & Writing, January 2024
A land fades into the vein, poem by Zêrevan Osê.
A land fades into the vein
Image of the massacre
The sound of carnage
Children lose their way into the desert.
1
I did not know her, oh, mole
What does the lonely do about language?
Move, strip, play
I did not know her, starting from her wilderness
In the soul that she sees
Manifested in a tree, in a string
Oh, the mole plant
Do you hear the river groaning?
When it aspires to the dry land
O terror, that steps like soldiers raping the land
Do you hear a dead voice?
Approaching from awakening
It becomes the trumpet of
The gods of war.
2
The devastation of the world requires a long listening instead of writing
that only resides in sleep
Listen, listen
Take the boat of the night as a journey, O toiler of formation!
A journey towards lamentations of the borders
Listen, listen
With a covenant of love for his family
With sculpted faces and their stillness
With a polite fork
Or a wasteland that aspires to be a universe
Listen, listen
To a river in a body
To a body until it becomes a river.
3
Now it is less noisy, the alternative to madness, the noise that breeds
the death of non-death
Maintenance of death
Love dims the short winter day
To be a corpse stretched out in the streets.
What is the new rag in the earth’s clothing?
I think it is war. The heat takes up a huge area of vegetation, reaching isolation
in its turbulent hearth. I think it is hatred running through the veins of the world from the beginning
Who will absorb the lake of anxiety from my eyes?
I am a miserable tree
Whenever the wind blows from one side, I dance with it
In the singer’s voice there is a war going on
In stillness
A hell that strips things of their colors.
© Zêrevan Osê
Zêrevan Osê (1986) is a poet and writer from the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He published two poetry collections and a critical book. In addition, he holds a master’s degree in Arabic literature. His texts were translated into (Turkish, French, and Kurdish). His poems were, also, published in various Arab magazines and newspapers.