Merely a Dream

 

 

Like the Byzantine’s bridge whose builder swore
to raise sun-baked brick upon all sides
until it was completed.
                      From the Mu’allaqa of Tarafa bin Al-Abd (ca. 543–569 CE)

You’re in the middle of September,
and life is a bridge in a dream.

Is this, then, the Byzantine’s bridge?
You cross over it
to all places,
and you fall from it
when the dream is over.
Don’t tell us you’re a prisoner
and no one will redeem you.
Don’t tell us your life’s become
merely a dream
in Byzantine lands.

This Breeze

 

 

In your eighty-third home now
among the Turks, the Armenians, the ghosts of the Ancient Greeks,
among your nightmares, which come only
from the homeland,
as if they were your only home . . .

Enough counting.
You have no home
except this breeze.

Two Stops

 

 

The bus arrives
before you’ve finished the poem.

Isn’t it enough
that your whole life is reeling?
Must the bus also jostle
the notebook in your hands?

Two stops won’t cut it:
Let’s dream of a bus
that never arrives.

[Untitled]

 

 

You lie and say
that death is a great delight.

No. Oblivion
is the true delight.
But it, too, is retreating now,
quiet
and evanescent.

Read more poetry by Najwan Darwish in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation in No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014–2024, a retrospective collection forthcoming from Yale University Press in November.