Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers April 2024.
Heaviness, poems by Samira Al Bouzadi.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
Heaviness
My lightness is heavy
I feed my beings with transparent bread at the end of the night
The eggs hatch in my imagination all at once
That’s why the poems flow like mysterious lust.
Hungry and blind
I monitor the cosmic door
I put all my secrets in my bag
And I wait for you
This is what I have trained to do all my life
Here I broke the dry loaf
And drank of the immortal poison
Here I folded the larger world into my words
Here God gave me the sad flame!
I have a voice that can be broken
And forgotten
Suitable as a chair for stressful days.
Crazy woman
I open a window to the darkness, and knock on the door of the Night
My neighbor says: This is a crazy woman
And my friends put stones in my feet
And my children pull me by my long dress
But I read the book of commandments
I learned to walk on my own with a damaged foot.
A dog barks in the dark under my balcony
I silenced him with the book “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.”
I know Borges will be upset from behind his
Grave
But that’s okay, I read it a hundred times
I will learn to silence my mouth by yawning
Because the light morning that floats in my head is bigger than every lie.
© Samira Al Bouzidi
Samira Al Bouzidi is a Libyan poet. She has published eight poetry collections, and one of her collections has been translated into Italian.
Translation by Dr. Salwa Gouda, an Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic at the English Language and Literature Department at Ain-Shams University. She holds a PhD in English literature and criticism. She received her education at Ain-Shams University and California State University in San Bernardino. She has published several academic books, including “Lectures in English Poetry, and “Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism” and others. She has also contributed to the translation of “The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers,” which includes poets and their poetry, philosophers, historians, and men of letters, under the supervision of UNESCO. Additionally, her poetry translations have been published in various international magazines.