Khaled Mattawa

Even the wind wants

to become a cart

pulled by butterflies.

I remember madness

leaning for the first time

on the mind’s pillow.

I was talking to my body then

and my body was an idea

I wrote in red.

Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne

and all the other colors

worship on red rugs.

Night is another candle.

In every branch, an arm,

a message carried in space

echoed by the body of the wind.

The sun insists on dressing itself in fog

when it meets me:

Am I being scolded by the light?

Oh, my past days –

they used to walk in their sleep

and I used to lean on them.

Love and dreams are two parentheses.

Between them I place my body

and discover the world.

Many times

I saw the air fly with two grass feet

and the road dance with feet made of air.

My wishes are flowers

staining my days.

I was wounded early,

and early I learned

that wounds made me.

I still follow the child

who still walks inside me.

Now he stands at a staircase made of light

searching for a corner to rest in

and to read the face of night again.

If the moon were a house,

my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.

They are taken by dust

carrying me to the air of seasons.

I walk,

one hand in the air,

the other caressing tresses

that I imagine.

A star is also

a pebble in the field of space.

He alone

who is joined to the horizon

can build new roads.

A moon, an old man,

his seat is night

and light is his walking stick.

What shall I say to the body I abandoned

in the rubble of the house

in which I was born?

No one can narrate my childhood

except those stars that flicker above it

and that leave footprints

on the evening’s path.

My childhood is still

being born in the palms of a light

whose name I do not know

and who names me.

Out of that river he made a mirror

and asked it about his sorrow.

He made rain out of his grief

and imitated the clouds.

Your childhood is a village.

You will never cross its boundaries

no matter how far you go.

His days are lakes,

his memories floating bodies.

You who are descending

from the mountains of the past,

how can you climb them again,

and why?

Time is a door

I cannot open.

My magic is worn,

my chants asleep.

I was born in a village,

small and secretive like a womb.

I never left it.

I love the ocean not the shores.

A salute to Jacques Berque

I imagine his voice as the sound of a tambourine,

that the tambourine is broken in his throat,

that his throat is a fire named God.

I imagine a poet

into whose innards history pours

drenching his words and pooling at his feet,

a poet who rains blood that some hoist as a banner made of sky.

Man’s Song

Sideways,

I glimpsed your face drawn on the trunk of a palm

and saw the sun, black in your hands.

I tied my longing to that tree and carried night in a basket

                                                                carried the whole city

and scattered myself before your eyes.

                                                Then I saw your face hungry like a child’s.

I circled it with invocations

and above it I sprinked jasmine buds.

Woman’s Song

Sideways,

I caught sight of his old man’s face

robbed by days and sorrows.

he came to me holding his green jars to his chest

rushing to the last supper.

Each jar was a bay

and a wedding held for a harbor and a boat

where days and shores drown

where seagulls probe their past and sailors divine the future.

He came to me hungry and I stretched my love toward him,

a loaf of bread, a glass cup, and a bed.

I opened the doors to wind and sun

and shared with him the last supper.

Not a star, not a prophet’s inspiration

not a pious face worshipping the moon,

here he comes like a pagan spear

invading the land of alphabets

bleeding, raising his hemorrhage to the sun.

Here he comes wearing the stone’s nakedness

thrusting his prayers into caves.

Here he comes

embracing the weightless earth.