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The Needle House

The Needle’s House
 Waiting For the Third Time Out
 Arabic Poem by: Salah Hassan *
 Translated into English by:
 Inaam Al-Hashimi (Gold_N_Silk)
 ======
 
Between me and me there is a civil war!
 It’s my war alone;
 I will wash away the speech
 And cross the language barrier
 I will resign from the verbal job
 And write my name in the manuscript of annihilation
 I will describe you, O war
 O my war!
 From the skies of drought and indifference
 I will look down on the atlas of blood
 With a bird’s eye look
 As a hawk breathing storms
 Because the hot red color
 Covers the map.
 My health is a candle
 But I am the wind’s begotten child
 The truth is not free
 The error is not a slave
 I will get out of the house of the needle
 To free the horizon of its windows
 And leave the thunder blabbering
 Till the Euphrates gets flooded
 And drown the Ziggurat and the gods.
 This is my nation
 It’s not a part of the world
 But rather a transient in it
 Its memory is a cemetery
 It is a stranger to happiness
 It doesn’t dream
 As it doesn’t sleep
 And if it did
 It would 
In a coffin.
 
I will describe you, O war!
 O my war!
 I will write you
 I will paint you
 I will mummify you
 I will translate you
 I will use you to lure traders,
 Odepians,
 Psychopaths
 And schizophrenics.
 So that you will be all done;
 I want you to get out of my language 
So I can write
 A text free of terror.
 
That’s the continuous present...
 Kings climb the Ziggurat
 And steal the myth of creation
 And the Sumerian language;
 Soldiers throw their helmets at the unseen
 That’s the continuous present...
 Lightning leads the floods
 to processions of the weary
 Running darkness 
tracks the bitter body and the memory.
 
I will describe you, Oh war!
 O my war!
 With black writing
 or purple writing;
 I will dig your mine fields 
With Cuneiform characters
 Or with the bones of your victims;
 Here are my clay tablets
 They are all chipped;
 Not your gods
 Not your kings
 Not your clerics
 And not your floods 
Were able to wipe off the blood of them
 It’s a ruined language
 But it breaths through its wound.
 
We die, and the war doesn’t stop;
 Our sons walk to it
 And it stands on their shadows;
 Our sons die
 Yet the war doesn’t stop;
 Their sons walk to it
 And it doesn’t stop
 Their sons walk to it
 And it doesn’t stop
 And their sons walk to it
 And it doesn’t stop.
 ***
 Translated by :
 Em. Prof. Inaam Al-Hashimi 
USA

 *Salah Hassan is an Iraqi poet
 http://www.alnoor.se/article.asp?id=212005

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