Celebrating Childhood (by Adonis -- Ali Ahmad Said Esber)
Celebrating Childhood (by Adonis -- Ali Ahmad Said Esber)
Translated by Khaled Mattawa
Original Text
Adonis: Selected Poems, trans. Khaled Mattawa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
This poem is reproduced on the Griffin
Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the International Shortlist 2011).
1Even the wind wants
2to become a cart
3pulled by butterflies.
4I remember madness
5leaning for the first time
6on the mind’s pillow.
7I was talking to my body then
8and my body was an idea
9I wrote in red.
10Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne
11and all the other colors
12worship on red rugs.
13Night is another candle.
14In every branch, an arm,
15a message carried in space
16echoed by the body of the wind.
17The sun insists on dressing itself in fog
18when it meets me:
19Am I being scolded by the light?
20Oh, my past days –
21they used to walk in their sleep
22and I used to lean on them.
23Love and dreams are two parentheses.
24Between them I place my body
25and discover the world.
26Many times
27I saw the air fly with two grass feet
28and the road dance with feet made of air.
29My wishes are flowers
30staining my days.
31I was wounded early,
32and early I learned
33that wounds made me.
34I still follow the child
35who still walks inside me.
36Now he stands at a staircase made of light
37searching for a corner to rest in
38and to read the face of night again.
39If the moon were a house,
40my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.
41They are taken by dust
42carrying me to the air of seasons.
43I walk,
44one hand in the air,
45the other caressing tresses
46that I imagine.
47A star is also
48a pebble in the field of space.
49He alone
50who is joined to the horizon
51can build new roads.
52A moon, an old man,
53his seat is night
54and light is his walking stick.
55What shall I say to the body I abandoned
56in the rubble of the house
57in which I was born?
58No one can narrate my childhood
59except those stars that flicker above it
60and that leave footprints
61on the evening’s path.
62My childhood is still
63being born in the palms of a light
64whose name I do not know
65and who names me.
66Out of that river he made a mirror
67and asked it about his sorrow.
68He made rain out of his grief
69and imitated the clouds.
70Your childhood is a village.
71You will never cross its boundaries
72no matter how far you go.
73His days are lakes,
74his memories floating bodies.
75You who are descending
76from the mountains of the past,
77how can you climb them again,
78and why?
79Time is a door
80I cannot open.
81My magic is worn,
82my chants asleep.
83I was born in a village,
84small and secretive like a womb.
85I never left it.
86I love the ocean not the shores.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011
Rhyme
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