Scenes

Salman Masalha

Scenes

The street paved with illusions
like an unraveled dream,
the sleepers on the bedding of their humiliation
and the awake on a broken sidewalk.
The weepers over their bitter fate
and the seekers of success,
The hiders of their prayer in their hearts
and those who have gone with the wind.
The boat forgotten beside the river
in the morning light -
pictures from the exile that the night
flung in my path and then departed.
O night that has forgotten the dew on my heart,
take me to a land that has garbed itself in death.
My body is a lamentation.


Translated by Vivian Eden

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For Arabic, press here.

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In Haifa by the Sea

Salman Masalha

In Haifa by the Sea

                (In memory of Emile Habiby)

In Haifa, by the sea, the smells of salt
rise from the earth. And the sun
hanging from a tree unravels wind.
In a row of trees bathed in stone
men, women and silence have been
planted. Tenants in an apartment
block called homeland.
Jews whose voices I haven't heard,
Arabs whose meaning I haven't understood.
And other such melodies I couldn't
identify in the moment that went silent.


There in Haifa, by the sea,
he had them all. Poet, exile
in the wind, seeking the past
in a question blessed with answers.
Pulling words out of the sea and
throwing them back to the waves
that, like Messiah, will return eternally.
A poet has returned to a poem he never wrote
in the night of captivity, and hasn't yet returned
to the place that he drew as a child in a cloud.


There in Haifa, by the sea, at the end
of the summer that broke on the treetop,
a moon unfurled. I return to the
silence I had split with my lips.
I return to the words asleep inside
the paper. Moist clods of earth
and a salty path have forever wrapped
the fisherman's pole. Little
words lay down to rest, and a poem
went silent there in Haifa, by
the sea.


Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden
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Published in: Haaretz Books, November 2008

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This poem is from, "In Place" (Am Oved, 2004). It is performed by singer Micha Shitrit on his album “Shilhei Kayitz.”
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For the Hebrew text, press here.

 

 

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Safar

Salman Masalha

Safar

I walk in the clouds.
My horizon tinted dew.
Mirages are the myths.
My life has passed in vain
Looking for the true.

If a friend would ask me back
To the land of the sane,
I'd never leave the sands,
I'd never leave the track.

Thoughts stretch taut at night.
Desire is a light
That sparkles in the eye.
I am a mad song.
Like an echo, I fly.



Translated by Vivian Eden

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For the Arabic text, press here.


To listen to the poem in Arabic, composed by Kamilya Jubran,
press here.

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