A Poem by Naseer Hassan

This is the first poem we worked on together. The punctuation is deliberately strange, though we are revisiting that issue to be sure the "strangeness" here in English is congruent to the strangeness in the Arabic. But meanwhile, a peek into a poem-in-progress:

The story of (that) time

The story of that time; … like tyrants “gargling” in the depths; in the forest’s quiet we were. Night was inside us; maybe we were stars, maybe we carried our clothes to where the river enters.

Dante says: the centaurs throw the tyrants in the river of blood[i]; I say: the forest is in the heart, and we inhabit al Midan[ii] square in the homeless rooms; judgment days pass colorless through us, and we are naked on the square of the universe.

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[i] Inferno: XII.

[ii] An old central square in Baghdad.