We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Revolution Day.

 

1.

Some travelers measure the earth
with a patch of text

some philosophers go to
a carpenter to lathe a question

some poets head to a tailor
to escape the rips widening within them

As for me, I run towards the rubble of emptiness or a heap
of shade in order to erase what is.

2.

There is no grave that can contain
the flavor of death pouring forth from the wooden bed

no grave that can gather what is left of words
sticking to the lips of a dead body

no room that can absorb the cold solitude
of a paper from which a poem has turned away

3.

The narrator doesn’t walk in the funeral procession
but listens only to what is said at the dinner for the dead
and collects what falls from the crumbs of words.

4.

I didn’t understand then
how the head can be in the horizon
and the leg in the grave

or how the gate of a graveyard can lead
to the courtyard of a poem

5.

In the end
I felt the desert’s thirst
for the grapes of Dionysus

and the cries of the ruins for
the dying embers

and the sadness of gazelles for
the silence of poets

6.

Instead of fleeing the blackness in my chest
towards the white of the paper

I threw myself in a field of yellow daisies
and fell asleep.

Translation by Deborah Kapchan