Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2025
Passion, poems by Mohammed Al-Kafrawy.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
Passion
Bring the passion
Bring it all
Pour it into this cup
Be careful not to let it spill
We don’t want anyone tangled in this affair
Living in weather charged with electricity
Only in our intimate moments can we make use of it
Bring the cup of passion close to my lips
I only want to breathe it in
To feel the sweetness of its taste
The softness of its touch
Its hellishly elastic texture
*
Bring the passion and scatter it here on the sofa
Leave us to examine it like a warm stain
Sit before it in awe
As if awaiting the birth of mythical beings.
*
Come now
Take my heart
Take my blood and the air from my lungs
Take a piece of my soul
Kneaded with memories and nostalgia
Take all of me
And bring the passion.
I conquered a city of fools with a rusted fist
A trash compactor,
Nothing less. Perhaps more.
The stench of living corpses twists through the void,
Slick snakes slithering into the soul’s channel,
Their heads bruised from static,
Their mouths traps for flies and other scatterbrained bugs.
They groan in pleasure
With every pickaxe blow or axe scrape that levels their limbs.
From the grinding of their joints escapes
The screech of a door abandoned for centuries.
Their bellies are more desolate than ruins.
*
Like a classic villain,
Scraping at nothingness with his nails and cackling,
Stumbling here and there
Hunting for fresh prey
Behind this vast hollow.
*
Wait a moment
I haven’t told you everything.
There, in the darkness,
Ghosts of the past materialized,
Demanding their rightful place for presence.
Here, at the cannon’s mouth,
They stood cheering, shrieking, and rattling,
Begging for the crowd’s fury to ignite,
To sink teeth into the flesh of the now.
At the city’s edge, the sun hardened.
Seems today won’t pass peacefully.
I am the one who unleashed that blaze upon you.
I conspired with desert sands
To scorch your skins
And leave their beloved imprint
On every passing body.
*
Truthfully, I owned no weapons
Just a tattered cloak and a box of illusions.
Yet my plan succeeded:
Entire armies fled,
Kingdoms collapsed, civilizations crumbled.
Here at the crossroads,
Where reason sets its traps
And leaves newcomers to fall into the snare.
*
With a rusted fist and a splintered heart,
He wanders without clear aim.
Was he cutting through streets seeking meaning,
Or drifting lost, chasing stray spirits?
No one knows precisely.
But in the end,
He managed to gather every groan seeping from the walls’ cracks,
Muster his strength, and strike deep with his fist
Down to the guts of lost time.
He emerged from the maze victorious,
Clutching a giant skeletal frame of a crumbling city.
Auburn-haired and Freckled
One day I loved an auburn-haired girl
She was auburn-haired and freckled
I saw her as a luminous being
In some way or another, I named those freckles “an overflow of the soul”
And I called her the Orange Girl
I dreamt she would come to me at night
Unveil the shroud over my heart
And fill it with fruits
I waited for her every morning
She would wrap me in a bundle
And call me to a long journey
I knew she possessed such tricks
As would make us own the world
Play with it… revel in it…
Then curse it and sink it into the earth.
And we’d make a new world every day
Out of ice creams and candy dolls
And the excess freckles that fell from her face.
© Mohammed Al-Kafrawy
Mohammed Al-Kafrawy is An Egyptian poet, born in 1978. He has been writing in cultural journalism and literary criticism since 1998. He has four collections of poetry: “A Pink Dream That Raises the Head” (2006), “Shortly After the Dead” (2018), “A Suspicious Place” (2020), and a fourth collection entitled “Scraping Nothingness with His Nails and Giggling,” which is under print at the Egyptian General Book Authority.
Translated by Dr. Salwa Gouda, who is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino.
She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.