Variations On My Clay Heartstrings Poem by Yahia Al-Samawy

Here I am, spreading fresh water, plaintive songs,
Sweet myrtle flowers,
Unsleeping.
I await nightly an apparition from my beloved
Who will hunt for me the bird of drowsiness?

2
Between your eyes and me
There is a forest of exiled trees
Fences of prison cells and a desert of lamentation.
Why do strangers bathe
In my country
In the drizzle of blessed rain
While the grass by the Euphrates bathes in pus and blood?
And why do we own nothing in our homelands
Except elegies?

3
Who will scale the fence of night and distance
And wipe the tears from our eyes
And the disgrace from our foreheads?
Who will return greenness to the grass
And to the river its waters
And peace to Karkh and Rassafa
Without aspiring to the Caliphate?

4
Country of date palms
And teardrops the shape of glittering stars,
If you make the rope into a noose
I will make from it a child's swing,
And from my wound a lily.

5
O winds!
Take the ash of our wounds
And pollinate the flower of revolt or the points of spears
Variations on My Clay Heartstrings


And then perhaps a dawn will break
From the womb of wounds.

6
O time of lamentation
My country
Is as wide as the sky
And as tight as a shroud