Poesía internacional

Dafina
Paris Follies
Poemas de Amari Hamedene
You depart in a whirl of last minute
reminders of what to do, of where to put me.
Then you're gone, leaving me
to climb the four flights,
the ancient wood curving into itself,
held intact by two centuries of footfalls.
My feet must make adjustments: to the climb,
to the six-sided floor tiles of your dwelling.
I'm still slipping, and though you're not here
to pick me up,
I feel you in the mint walls,
the four roses drooping after a night on Paris,
the cappuccino stock-piled,
the sibilant hiss of the stereo tuning into Reggae.
And in that family shot (we stare straight ahead:
you the only one not looking at the camera)
keeping a benign eye "sur le petit matin ".

The Dark Angel
Life, said Hobbes, is nasty, brutish and short.
He left out boring, as grim a condition as any.
His tigerish namesake's epiphany,
in 20-point captions, is a Sunday slot.
Then there's Chekhov, who, a moment ago, wrote,
The earth is beautiful, as are all God's creatures,
only one thing is not beautiful, and that is us.

Between theorist, toy policeman, terrorists, there's
a ladder of land no man claims as his.
I'll settle down there with old friends, familiars:
a monkey, my famous barking birds in pairs,
and defrocked wizard, the bald marabout bear.
Dawn, like alcohol, half-lights a watery world:
all things break down to flesh, food and fear.
It's late December in Algiers, downstream all Africa
"glorious showers, thunderclouds continue".
My mind unwinds as the century slows,
dribbles its years to a whining close
and defunct days peddle the news.
Listen: nothing, not even love, is true.

Revolutionary Women
At night I watch the moon and imagine exciting places
over the horizon. Only a fool does not see that the vast
industrial economies are temporary. I say too much.
My throat is infected with words. At the country hospital,
I am treated by a beautiful doctor. That evening we drink
sultanas lemonade from the valley on the terrace of the hotel.
Look, she says, the moon is moving into the distance,
three centimetres each year, which is the speed at which
fingernails grow! We sing revolutionary songs until all hours,
drinking to friendship between our two countries.
In her language, the word for 'Sunday' is 'resurrection'.
I leave the following morning.

Sorry missiles
I blow a speck of dust from my hand.
I watch it drift, tiny -- so tiny -- up.
It seems to hang for a moment then gently
it falls, slowly, softly through the late night
onto the table. Silent. Infinitely delicate.
At the same instant somewhere brute bombs
blast into bone and blood through stone and tin.
Surgical air-strikes. Surgical. Missiles
like space-ships into children.

Translated by Kate Purkhardt, Lucie Brisson and the author

The Golden Cupolas
Statistics never change on the calendar of trust
but clouds and wind are playing at sleight-of-hand
with the souvenirs.
Words split like isotopes
in this peacetime parcel of earth
of deserted squares, blank bowers,
withered gardens and broken roofs.

Only the madman, in his garland of dried daisies,
has the permit of crossing here
and the blind beggar who recollects nothing
except the spider ticking in his wired skull.

For a second, between two versions
of a ricochet, the time of yore doesn't happen:
the golden cupola remains, a roc's egg
veined blue, shelled by sirocco.
Confess
to no crime of identity.
Wait until the guillotine falls

in the vast silence of the heart.

The 1002nd Night
I undressed you to take the measure of the sky.
My patience is vertical.
A pinned bug will moan of light.
You look at me, and like a calm city,
you open to me all your reeling streets.

I write on you a dream to the ultimate of blood.
His secret in my fists
opens his amber letter.

I illuminate the life to your hip,
and last sovereign of my oriental fairy-tales,
I finish the history of the world.

Translated by Kate Purkhardt, Lucie Brisson and the author.

Caravanserai
Dunes crumple the sand behind the funnels of wind
a paparazzi is lain down in his Jeep
The lens of his camera patiently turned toward the sky
Unperturbed,
he tracks clouds until they show their breasts
He must make for Paris Match
a parallel in a cibachrome photo
between the chest of Gina Lollobrigida and the Sahara
blur summer skies of the equatorial west.

Ah that they become shameless under the amazing eye
of Islam. The fortune is his,
but clouds don't dare since the affair of Salman Rushdie
and September 11.

Of course, a strap drops from time to time
but almost and immediately is quickly put back in its place
by the swarms of birds of Allah.
He ventured himself too much the paparazzi of Abu Ghrib
as far as the furnace of the Middle-East and he scorched
Divine goodness! Allah the big itself wonders!

Translated by Kate Purkhardt, Lucie Brisson and the author.

The Soul of Violins
Alone on the bench, she thinks of the part of horizon where the sky is in ruins.

Who is this man, suddenly seated close to her? He is as white as the crusts.
He speaks of what is it necessary of love to arouse screaming which drives all the birds mad.

She watches, puts down close to her the face drawn between desert and shelter, and accepts the invitation to go with him, hearing music which he composed,

In the dwelling nearby the woods, they are four violins lit-up in the distance. She hears music rising from the place of things she carries in her, floating on a retaken pond.

When the violins were quiet, she recognized the infinite march of the river losing the memory of its banks.

The glorious fragility of the violinist's hands, the points of sky to their faces, she keeps them within her when she leaves the place and moves away.

Globalisation
And I, James, in the year of the hog,
I rose in the year of the goose,
of the replete goose of the French-fleet leftovers.
And I left on the smashed road
of our soul Vietnam
testifying, a goose hung to the neck,
by the way in which we stole the soul of Algeria
over the independence square
while I slid down the marble stairs
toward a garden
where the flowers of an orange tree bloomed
carrying only bloody fruits.

Glasses are full of stars this night.
The mushrooms spout in the old tunnel of Algiers
and women with bare backs drink Sherry-Brandy,
the symphony of the New World in resonant bottoms.
The bodies trigger short circuits,
as unfamiliar words about Ecology
and the sailors of all the nations
pollute the sidewalks of our capital,
illuminating by electric torchlight the realism
of the thigh of a young-joy-girl
barely deflowered, a runt in her uterus.
The violence in Iraq is in the drinking binge
and little girls of the world
give birth and drop ethical children.

For them, menopause is a garden.
The pill of the following-days is a mythological program.

In the year of the hog,
someone picks truffles in France.
South Africa ruminates that "Le Noir est Beau".
And around me, women
persist in drinking Sherry Brandy,
while their men eat fat liver goose pâté.

And I, James, I testify,
a goose hung to the neck,
in the manner of those who stole the soul of Algeria,
while others pretend to see nothing.