Plague Lands: And Other Poems
180
Plague Lands: And Other Poems
180eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847779335 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| File size: | 480 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Plague Lands and Other Poems
By Fawzi Karim, Abbas Kadhim
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 1995 Fawzi KarimAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-933-5
CHAPTER 1
Part One
Channels maintained by the rain ...
Houses as precarious as stacked-up disks of bread;
Their window-nets like tattered sieves;
Their doors holding their breath in case there's a call in the night;
The power cables droning with the current of suppressed desires
And the alleys twisted, just like a warrior's braids.
The Tigris will nudge us with its epics
And, with its wand, expose the deceit
of burdened skies that weep for the days on end.
Fish leap out at their observers;
Bury their heads in their garments' folds,
And, having secreted their eggs there, give up the ghost.
Ripples drench the pores of our mutual yearning
with the scent of myth.
Ripples caress our pillows in the night hours,
And mirrors alternate with the sun in searing our bodies.
Ripples throw up the smell of dung, palm pollen, rushes and clay,
Willows, the furnace's mouth,
The ominous cry of a crow behind a fence,
Reeds and silt and the scent of al-Khidr candles.
Sacrificed blood stains the tunnel of my boyhood:
the one that leads to the myth.
At the entrance to an alley – out of which poured everything –
I imagined Gilgamesh.
Go pluck a bloom from the home-grown oleander
And sell its scent to the vendor.
On the day that I was born,
While my mother remained unconscious
And my father began to prepare for the flood,
A world war ground to its halt.
At this mighty junction of deteriorating time
We were naively growing up reckless.
We would salute that oleander, hot with our uniqueness:
A family of diverse individuals – distinguished by our father's face,
While our mother's linked us like a many-blossomed tamarisk.
Who can blame my brother for discouraging
my insatiable self-curiosity?
Who can blame my mother for nourishing
my yen for some unreachable fantasy?
The girls next door are not to blame,
nor are the boys with dreams laid low
because of the revolution.
No one's to blame.
Though the eye turns black as night itself,
And the days are knots in barbed wire.
My father died, and my mother died.
And the oleander was used for firewood.
No one's to blame:
Neither the wrongdoer nor the one wronged;
Neither the thief nor his mark;
Neither the adulterers nor the ones who stone their homes.
I can't fault the sun for scorching me ...
But there are the cats that would pounce from behind
the black backdrop of fate:
The black cats that spit, that are fevered, that pounce
Under the skin of the mask of the face of the darkness;
Cats that keep pouncing, keep scratching my face,
Their claws in a scrabble for lost chords scratched from the voice.
The soul cats pounce
In silence, as if the house had vanished,
As if hundreds of towns
and whole countries
Had vanished;
Utterly shrunk by horizons shutting them down.
No one can blame the mystic, who pokes the nipple and mutters,
'The truth is out!'
While she exposes a pair of innocent breasts.
No one is ever to blame, for desire is a can of worms!
Or, in my case, book-worms, I guess.
I read The Book of Beasts by al-Jahiz
And The PerfumedGarden.
I read The Trials of Destiny quite deeply, and the Lives,
With The Fruits of Literature beside me.
I then wrote a book
On The Classification of Souls in the Monastery of Solitude
That dealt with those gone astray in the maze of the state.
And I wrote an Elucidation of Certain Alexandrianisms
in Verse Wanderings by Bewitched Waters,
And on The Soul's Transcendence of Sexual Repression.
The margin is reserved for a book on the untold,
though I haven't written this yet.
But this is why I was never awed
by my Sufi friend in the Café Ibrahim,
Nor silenced by the dogma of my friend the revolutionary,
fashioning a slogan from some principle.
As for debate in the bar at the Gardenia,
All I ever wanted was a drink.
Summer was heavy, heavy ...
The dead more fatigued by the sun than the quick.
It takes a stiff arak to fortify the mind
against the slow rot of a rigid daily round
And pickle one till tougher than the grass
They set ablaze with slogans and the flags that come to pass.
'Things in the bar seem to hug one another:
This table, that chair, the leftovers from the appetiser,
The water from some thawed ice a crescent at my heel,
The shadow cast, and the warmth of the hand
still holding the emptied glass.
Do you hear a voice? The waves
Go pounding through my head. Drowning's on the cards.
Things hug one another.'
War detonates as Baghdad sets out for the markets.
I was born, I think, in a mellower year;
A year when people still paused at the smell of corpses.
Now I smell the roasting of a thigh,
And the deep voice: 'That roasting thigh is a traitor's.'
He pours on more kerosene
And the fire glows and the smell of flesh gets stronger.
My brother and I began as the chanters of slogans.
We saw the world with its trousers down and laughed.
We opened vents for the smell in our shackled bodies
And the smell disappeared within us.
That revolutionary summer had just such a smell.
And my father said, 'Whoever goes sniffing out corpses
would want to be rid of their stench.'
My father was never wrong. But it was a mellower year
A year when people still paused. A year
That saw the barrier go down between me and that smell,
Between me and the era, between me and its dogma.
Summer shows Baghdad in its true colours:
In these, the stars of the military shine,
To emerge at dawn as a crown of thorns
Placed on the people's grey.
Their brows are the archive
Testifying to the pronouncements of the revolution.
Bitter the ordeals it engenders.
And poetry, shaven of pate, shepherds everything, high on a hill.
A rural man with a flowing gown,
How striking he looks, as the sun sets: one who enjoys his aloneness.
One with a view about everything, just as he sees fit:
'I am at one with the breeze, and this is how I am.'
But poetry departs, when under threat; heads for
The snow-capped peaks. Poetry always departs,
Its shrinking silhouette ever decried as apathy.
Now I shall partake of the forebodings of al-Rumi,
Enter the house occupied by the clairvoyant in the verse of al-Tayyib,
Lock myself into the cages of Abu Tammam,
And, orphaned, I'll tend prohibited fruit in the orchard of Abu Nuwas
While tearfully striking sparks from the Saqt al-Zand.
And I shall descend, with punters such as Baghdadi,
Into the dens of the poor who wear nothing but shadows,
As Ibn Nabata would reel from the dens of Shorja
Enwreathed in the heady aroma of spices and debt.
Penny-wise, they say.
But what if you seriously need
To become well-off?
It was Iraq that betrayed us,
Although we never exposed it to much
Beyond the pain of our leaving.
Now, as if covertly,
Abu al-Hasan al-Sallami
Tails this departure, and that one,
While a sugared trace of Ibn Sokara –
Finely-featured, powdered clown, auguste –
Perches, perches moon-like, on the fence.
Neither our crown prince nor caliph,
Nevertheless, you snubbed us!
Keep up the snobbery, I say,
For I have no pay you can stop.
Why hold a job for the losing?
Not that this makes me perfect.
Paragons of virtue get accused.
Poetry alone is a burning without smoke,
Though certain rhymes do have their undertones.
A few light words can wreck a reputation,
And, however delicate the musk,
Larded on, it can become a stench.
Then Ibn al-Hajjaj reiterates his low laugh:
'I fled from my home to a country,
Where the famine turned my pecker yellow.'
Famine turns the pecker yellow! Hurry to Beirut
Only to be deafened by the rantings of performance poets.
Spoken words turn the market riotous,
And it's a riot, writing for the market.
Plagiarised melody roars out its rant,
And the sea rolls out a premonition, hints at a rage
That seems, to the fugitive, strange.
All he is fleeing is his witnesses' contempt.
'The honed blades of home' stroke my side
And 'the noose of yearning' fits around my neck,
So I might as well keep pestering that girl made of stone,
Colour in her navel and her breasts
With my brush, and conjure up a Beirutesque kerfuffle!
Taking me up by the scruff of my fright,
She scatters me over the coffee-shops of Rawsha
Like a spray misting from the sea.
If I'm going to sober up, I'd better steer clear of the news-stands
– Their spice is stronger than the dens.
There's no way to slip off the mare
That gallops through the meadow-lands of memory.
I try to be alone with the darkness of the sea.
I sit on the beach, I stretch a foot into the chattering well.
Toes touch the warm fluff of mystery.
Then, at the crossroads of intangible and tangible,
I try to embrace my immortality.
The wine-dark sea is a mirror for those coffee-shops
And sparkles like the necklace that adorns
The ivory throat of Beirut.
I stare in awe at a quart of arak
And the remnants of a stony-hearted scent.
I leave Beirut as I left home, again with a strange premonition:
It'll break out. It's possible.
It'll break out.
They will pitch its tent there.
Yes, its dusty tent will appear.
Its cats will yowl
and spray their eager scent ...
With threadbare rags we patch up the holes in the tent.
It's jam-packed with corpses, of course,
Putrefaction piled on putrefaction.
Of the dead, only their halo
Is visible to the faraway viewer;
Resonating, silver as the moon.
That's not the moon. It's a millstone.
And this is War, and it's blind.
It sets forth blithe as a girl
With a come-hither look for the ignorant;
But then it burns its candle at both ends
And ends up a loveless thing, a crone,
Hair cropped, in the dock, detested,
Posing, obscenely, for denouncement.
Do I really care about Baghdad?
The Turkish siege was interminable.
How many heads did it harvest?
Didn't the Tigris monopolise the corpses,
and take on the scarlet of flags?
The walls would allow in besiegers
simply to nab them.
Thus the captives multiplied,
And hangings stretched across the Eastern Gate.
It costs so little to stretch
The necks of the lower ranks.
Summer was heavy, heavy ...
The dead more fatigued by the sun than the quick.
It takes a stiff arak to fortify the mind
against the slow rot of a rigid daily round
And pickle one till tougher than the grass
They set ablaze with slogans and the flags that come to pass.
I see the women panting after bowls of soup
While young men lap at the wounds of the Almighty,
Then a kid tugs at a soldier's boot
And the clock stands still, tells nothing.
Dulce et decorum est – as they might say
in the West. The sun hisses
Like wires hiss above flags. Dulce et decorum est.
The sun dries the blood on perished lips.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
Dulce et decorum est. Dulce et decorum est.
The kid pulls off the boot of his reclining warrior.
The kid pulls and the neck stretches and so does the rope
And so does the night.
Part Two
My sufferings
had me in knots from which
My poems kept aloof,
Untainted by the soul's contamination.
Licking my wounds, overwhelmed by farewells,
I became weathered, for sure, but never
Frozen by the ice-blast of suppression.
That froth in the East is the dawn,
Though night allows her skirt to drag
Drunk in a doorway, out of tune;
But won't I insist on discovering
The face of an angel before me
And make excuses for a single slip,
Ignoring a propensity for wantonness?
Haven't I attributed my powers to the Tigris
– not that it's ever noticed –
And sighed, in correspondence with the grass,
Which remains deaf when I sob like a child
over the dying of flowers?
No point in tarting up nature though,
Nor in revering its negligence.
Is a man scared by a scarecrow?
Countryside, strung on a clothes line.
Dogs kicked out, feral cats
Fossicking in the waste ground
of downtrodden projects
For what remains of the done-away-with.
The ass in my neighbour's garage
May connect the old way with modernity,
But I can't get out of my head that sardonic glance
Exchanged with the guy the dawn escorted away.
That angel may prove pretty vacant
When questioners tear you apart.
Part Three
He returns to his watering-hole in Baghdad:
Pleasant surprise, lad!
What you been up to?
How many? How many yielding waves
Have cleaved to his torn sail?
How many landfalls? How many beaches?
Look, it's his hang-out, as for its booze,
He drinks it, affording no answers.
Not any more is the glass some puzzled mouth
Alluding to the wellsprings of a human one,
Nor are its contents blood revealing,
In their unstaunched flow, the murderer's identity,
Nor are the states it induces the wings
of a boy who flew too high,
Breaking the family mirror.
Ours is a nightspot crashed by a gang.
The waiter finds their faces unfamiliar.
They just barged in, as a house is raided at dawn,
And the corpse of a fellow passing through
gets thrown out, cold as the rest of them!
Where did they come from?
Who the hell are they?
Where do we go for help?
For fresh air, head for the Tigris. Beside it,
Gilgamesh is waiting in disguise:
'What happened before will happen again,
And again and again and again,
A fifth and a sixth and a seventh time,
And an eighth and a ninth, it will happen again.
It happens so since the world requires it
out of regard ... for security.
The days of this creature are numbered.
Its deeds are breaths of air.'
'Yes, but why the modern dress,
Gilgamesh?'
'The present masks the past
In this long-extant polis, where humanity
dies of a broken heart,
Though the despair that's broken it survives.'
'And what do you suppose will happen now?'
'I look out, over the embankment. I see some corpses floating down,
And me among the corpses.
I know this for certain.
Why? Because the tallest never reach the sky;
And as for the most powerful,
they cannot hug the earth in its entirety.'
'But what is this embankment?'
'This is the dike that prevents the past from flooding,
flooding in on us.'
Enkidu's nightmare frightened him to death,
and yet its signs were false,
As were all his readings.
'Eat the bread, Enkidu, eat it, for this is the staff of life.'
Thus spake the whore of the temple.
'Yes, and drink the wine,
For though it saps your brutishness, it is the custom here.'
And what did he do? He ate, drank and became faint with pleasure.
And didn't it seep into him, the scent of the Euphrates?
And didn't his body then secrete
a sweat with the palm pollen's odour?
Gilgamesh, don't you remember?
Don't you remember the worms?
Our nightmares frighten us to death, and yet their signs are false.
Then take these streets that creep along like tortoises,
And start, start if you like,
From the start of this street where the bars are.
Go by the sinful bridges and the idiotic lampposts.
Put on a suit, like any of us,
And try our contemporary senses.
You'll not find the sixth, for it rotted away.
Then I woke up on Abu Nuwas Street, just at the start of dawn,
and the bench was wet, as were all the benches:
The wet, worn benches of each small café.
And wet were the willow groves on sandy, sodden banks nearby,
Wet and rusty were the carved arms of the benches,
the short arms of the lampposts.
Wet was the smell of the grill
as the dew dropped down from the night,
And staking out the ground,
Wet were the wooden fences that run between one café and the next,
Between each bar and the sidewalk;
Fences that wend behind wisteria and hoard the webs of spiders,
These also became wet, and the wetness was an oil on them,
While that odour that gets everywhere,
That odour of inebriated moisture,
started to waft over Abu Nuwas,
the cherished street of our secrets.
From a distance you might view the moisture
lying there slick
as a mirror in the rain
that hints at the light's first rays.
A rain that may presage the sun
As waters from the womb announce nativity.
His wet teeth chatter, but the rain silences everything.
Unsullied slickness of asphalt.
A fisherman passes. The drunk,
shocked by an early awakening,
rolls off one of the benches:
The reek of its slats is still in his coat-tails today.
A bicycle glides by without a rider,
Then a dog approaches,
Intrigued perhaps by the smell of scraps:
Some dog kicked out, some stray without identity.
I sat up straight on the bench, as the night came to its end.
Then I got up and turned back,
Intent on the other pavement and
The row of stacked, adjoining bars.
I tried to shake the impact of the downpour off my clothes.
Of course, after that, I turned back yet again
For the book and the pad that I'd left on the bench,
Then headed for the Gardenia. It was closed.
No trace there of the stranger, nor of his strange smell.
I placed my forehead on the plate-glass front
And peered in at the darkness of the bar.
And there was nothing there for me to look for.
I couldn't see a single thing I coveted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Plague Lands and Other Poems by Fawzi Karim, Abbas Kadhim. Copyright © 1995 Fawzi Karim. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Introduction by Elena Lappin,
Plague Lands,
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4 (seven poems),
Part 5,
Part 6 (four poems),
Part 7,
A Reader in Darkness,
A Soldier,
At The Gardenia's Entrance,
Silent Nature,
Letters,
The Cold Sculpture,
The River,
Afterword: Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford. The Poetical Journey of Fawzi Karim by Marius Kociejowski,
Notes on the Poems,
About the Author,
Also available from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,