Ounsi Al-Hajj كلُّ قصيدة ، كلُّ حبّ translated

Each poem, each love
By Ounsi Al-Hajj

Each poem, is the beginning of poetry
Each love, is the beginning of the sky.
In me, the wind takes root
Makes dust of me.
The wind sweetens the trees, as I anoint you in sweetness
As the trees absorb the earth, you absorb me.
And you are the little one
All that you want
Is bestowed upon you eternally.
Fasted about you is the pain of our differences
I extract you from yourself
and you extract me,
We are hasting to the essential intoxication
We are renewed till we squander
We reiterate till we evanesce
We absent ourselves in delinquency
In bereaved happiness
And we enter rosy nullity, delivered from every impurity.
You are not what I have clasped
but the soul of ecstasy.
.... And upon envisioning the extremities of knowledge, wings carried me from discipline to estrangement.
For whom claims satiety, hunger
For whom avows tedium, the sting of delirious love
And for those who cry out “No! No!”, the agonizing manifestation - unrepulsable
In the desert of absolute triumph.
The manifestation, sudden as a hoax
As a dallying Messiah
As a peach frozen in the utter desert
Your appearance bowing his head with the weight of intuitive ignorance
And I say to him “Yes! Yes!”,
Facing the foremost balcony
Whensoever I hurled myself to the interval of love
I burned up the stretch from the lifespan of your death
An existence of who you were! ...
Rise
Your roots rise in the return
Go
Arrive at the earliest tree
Oh primordial mother
Oh last lover
Dear blazing heart
Dear gold from surfaces, and sun from windows
Dear apparition of lightning the augur facing me
My dear gazelle and my dear absence
Dear forest ghosts, my dear vehemence
My dear gazelle turning amongst the kids to say to me: approach
And I approach
I cross the rugged absence like a glimpse
The desert transformed to explosive waters
And you’ve become the gazelle of all my epochs,
I flee from you and you germinate in my heart
and you flee from me
You return to your hidden mirror below the doorstep of my recollections.
Your hands are the branches of war
Your hands are savory revenge on me
The hands of your eyes
The hands of a girl perpetrating
Your hands are the head’s night.
You silence me so they do not hear us
And your eyes are filled with fear
Enthralled, shivering with dread
As if now a child was born.
You retract the words about your body
As a rosy covering.
Your nakedness is revealed in the room
Emergence of the sole word
Without the finality of a mirage in the hand’s grasp.
Who protects me from the far-flung day
Who protects me from the night’s departure.
Not any craving but a craving for the crossing
Not any wish but the wish of a fugitive towards the felicity of annihilation.
Go far, ghost amiss
And it doesn’t rush upon us early
It snatches and it extinguishes
And kills what does not die
For life after the murder.
Love is my salvation, O Moon
Love is my wretchedness
Love is my death, O Moon.
I don’t emerge from the darkness but for asylum in your bareness, and not from the stream of light but for an inebriation with your gloom.
Your eyes gain in the day’s game and are gaining in the night’s game.
Gaining beneath all great towers and gaining against all the waves.
Gaining like religion wins in its triumph and in its ruin.
I bring behind the embers a keepsake of your endless beauty as memories forgotten,
Appropriating every space, to your amazement
How does everyone grow up and you do not grow up.
Your golden eyes creep into my veins.
No longer am I known save by the blind
Because they see love.
What I own in you is not your body
But the soul of the first free will
It’s not your body
But the nucleus of the first body
It’s not your soul
but the true soul before fog flooded over the world.
The sun rises in your body
and you are cold
Because the sun is burning
and everything that burns up is cold from the excess of force.
Each poem is the heart of love
Each love is the heart of death miscarrying by the uttermost life.
Each poem is the last poem
Each love is another scream
Each love, O phantasm, the falling into depths, Each love is death till the last,
And what I hold onto in you is not your body
But the heart of Allah
I press it, I press it
To numb the abductor’s rapturous outcry
The torment of my carnage everlasting.

[Translated from the Arabic by Dominique Sirgy]

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