XXIII

Where I walk I see doors

and it's not clear

and it's not simple.

Where I walk I see women

and the women twist themselves 

                                along branches.

A wall to the left, a wall to the right

and moss everywhere, to make it even darker.






Will I see the fountain where the water becomes ebony

becomes boat, becomes oar

                          and hurls itself?

Will I see the fountain which becomes feather

becomes eagle

              becomes space?

Will I see mounted men

gallop toward the mountain-top

from where water gushes

                        into the water which permits sight

where I see an island

                  where I walk

                  where all the men and all the women

                  together

                           row towards the stars?




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Poetry From the August 2006 issue: Hot Nights, Cold Blood: Noir, Part Two

Rachida MadaniRachida Madani

Rachida Madani was born in Tangiers in 1951; she still lives there. Contes d'une tête tranchée was published in 2001 in Morocco by Editions Al-forkane; the French text was published in France in 2005 by Les Editions de le Différence.

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Translated from FrenchFrench by Marilyn HackerMarilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names (Norton, 2009), Essays on Departure (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006), and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). Her essay collection Unauthorized Voices was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010. Her twelve volumes of translations from the French include Rachida Madani's Tales of a Severed Head (Yale University Press, 2012); Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), which received the 2007 Robert Fagles Translation Prize and the 2009 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; Hédi Kaddour’s Treason (Yale University Press, 2010); and Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Nettles (The Graywolf Press, 2008). For her own work, she is a past recipient of the Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets’ Prize, the National Book Award , two Lambda Literary Awards, the American PEN Voelcker Award for poetry in 2010, and the Argana International Poetry Prize from the Bayt As-Shir/ House of.Poetry in Morocco in 2012. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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