by Egon Lass

Created on: May 01, 2009

BADAWI

I have not been the pointer
Of just survival's clock,
Not in my fourth decade
When I knew you, Ali,
ullam Badawi of Tulul.

Beater of wives, robber of peasants,
Taunter of Western values!
How did our friendship endure
Through nothing but contradictions?

Where the nomads had their dominion
By the tearless dumb wadi,
I trembled in the hands of night.
My tent shaped the physics

Of a donkey's bray,
And barks blew in from the hills
Catching my window-flap.

My fear, rejecting me,
Changed homes and moved
Into a dandelion's open eye.
The babbling fields lay hunched
Beneath ten billion raping roots.

Ali,
The plural agony of your wives!
Did ever your glance make flowers
When its lightning rode like a nail
Into Qamli's wooden terror?
With gnashing teeth
She covered her morning sickness;
In the garden of your desires
She made her yesterdays to blossom.

Since then
My words are not from Jericho.
They tear me from silence
Like sullen Baltic languages.

How did you swim down
From the mountain of your illiteracy,
Down into worlds of thought?
What cloud poured you out,
To go rushing through philosophy's valley?
The branches of colored light
Have left the hills behind;
Fog wanders weeping through the night.
Since then
Without her oceans
Time is nothing.
By the tent fires
My own ideas had forgotten me.
I succumbed to the lilt of Qur'an voices.

Plied now
By the trade that follows me
Burning with Bedu fires,
I dream the feasts of Aqabat Jabr,
With you, Ali,
ullam Badawi of Tulul!

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