Nouri al Jarrah
Nouri al Jarrah Poems
To have gone back to Damascus
to have been able to.
To have left England,
to have opened a door in winter
...
Had I known that I was beginning at the end
and the playful yellow
of the trees
...
Not a night passes by without this glare rising, the abducted brilliance of my life;
without pavements forgetting me
and a train taking me again to the cemetery.
...
My words are dying.
Bringing them water,
I arrive to find them dead -
...
The denouement... but above and behind,
our retreat
saw in the last trail of summer
the spectre of a smile,
...
I desire light,
sleeplessness fills my eyes.
I am the remnant in a grave,
a wafted chrysalis -
...
Her arm on the bed...
The open window bright on her arm,
colour undulates in light,
door and chair are witness
...
Nouri al Jarrah Biography
ouri al-Jarrah (Arabic: نوري الجراح) (Damascus, 1956) is a Syrian poet. He moved to Beirut in 1981, then to Cyprus and finally to London working as journalist in a number of Arabic newspapers and magazines. al-Jarrah established a literary magazine named Al-Katiba of which 15 issues have been published and has also published a number of poem collections. He is also a director of The Center for Arabic Geographical Literature-Exploration Prospects which is based in Abu Dhabi and London. The institute has published a number of works relating to Arab travel literature, most significantly Hassan Taufik al Idl travels in late 19th century Germany.)
The Best Poem Of Nouri al Jarrah
Elegy Number One
To have gone back to Damascus
to have been able to.
To have left England,
to have opened a door in winter
and found all-glorious summer behind each opening.
Now... here... always...
England... with or without Damascus.
England, a grey time,
a shuddering of limbs,
and no escape
from the entanglement of leaf and thorn.
yet... Despair? Hope?
The day unbends.
To have gone back
and found Damascus...
something lacking,
completed,
was all mine.
Indifferent time topples thousands...
under weeping graves...
the assassinated and the assassin lie...
Judgement proceeds
with proud, respected gait,
the witness in his tattered clothes.
There goes the infant,
the orphaned life,
and the narrator... he... who encloses the sea
with his short story,
[writing what he sees];
often, he moved on further,
still writing what he saw.
Length and width, be probed the clamour,
then...
returning, he stretched and said:
I am the sleeping writer -
he seemed as dead as they were,
yet, he was fresh
as the flower in his hand.
To have found this door
To have found this hole of past eternity
and having found those simple pleasures...
a stroll ... no more than the remnants of voices
crushed by the crowd
engulfing the incoming rain.
The whisper of the past buttressed by the evening sky...
a whinnying horse moves across the frame...
fresh blood gushes from my shoulder...
Translated by Nawar al-Hassan
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