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Shearsman 61 |
Hyam Yared Shoucair
from The
Wounds of Water |
2To recognise your tongue in my vanishing
10 Roots
*
In the mirror of mornings, a sound. A path.
Then another.*
Your hand, a devouring root beneath my skin
crosses a solitude.*
The dead leaf shuts nothing in the tree
but rejoins the journey.*
Ants dispute the sun
without memory.*
You've lost yourself? Look at the oak. See
if it recognises you.*
Root after root. Births
in your voice.*
There are slopes where wine
is a fruit. A thirst.*
The path teaches water
to rejoin our footprints.*
17
Silence of wood. Sound of many hands.
Beyond your door, a fence of grief.
18
My breath keeps me inside you
and the tree which sees us siphoning our shadows
is a sanctuary which leads
to my anonymity.
19
I unmake the faces* of my body
What's left in the street? A skin
on a journey.
33
In my mother's belly legends
pushed me out of the world. I was born
through death. In the rush I left behind
my reflection. I leave to find myself
in mazes of water.
34
The word writes me. In the poem
I am nothing but a hand.
38
I couldn't cut through water
with my reflection.My wound in my reflection.
my reflection in my wound.My wound is healed by water.
Unrippable faces.
39
You cross the tunnel of my body,
a forest set ablaze by its own fire. There
do you find more embers than in my eyes,
more life than in a dead leaf? A journey
between sky and clay: too many worlds
between me and my body. An odyssey of hands
stretching further than water.
49My finest hymen. Abandon. A way
To your other side.
52
We are shelled by our gestures. By our glances too.
Water steps forward.
54
A river has flowed between us, rising
towards earth. Dust
awaits inside.
56
In my body the proof of God: a silence.
A thirst. My wound sets me free.
57
A flood rescues me
from my nakedness.
[* Migrations still in the state of ideas.]
Copyright © Hyam Yared Shoucair, 2004.
Translations copyright © Richard Burns and Melanie Rein, 2004.
Hyam Yared Shoucair (left) with Melanie Rein. |
Hyam Yared Shoucair was born in 1975 in Lebanon. Her first book, Reflets de Lune (Dar Anahar, Beirut, 2001) won the gold medal at the Francophone Games (Québec, 2001). She was awarded the Order of the Pléiade by the Association of Francophone Parliaments (APF, 2001). Her poems have been published in Lebanon, Portugal and Italy. She is Secretary for PEN in Lebanon. These poems are extracts from her work-in-progress, The Wounds of Water, which will be her second book. Richard Burns has appeared in Shearsman on several occasions, and his long poem Avebury can be down-loaded as an e-book from the Shearsman website. His Selected Longer Poems, For the Living, appeared from Salt Publishing in September 2004. Richard Burns & Melanie Rein both live and work in Cambridge. |
