The sailor who sank at the bottom of the prison
From Arabic Dr. Yousef Hanna | Palestine
By Fathi Muhadub | Tunisia
The doctor should not have woken me up in 1994
He had to announce my death at one o’clock after midnight
To knock gongs and bring clouds
To laugh long like a gorilla
Since my head is flat and full of dead wolves,
He had to pierce my head vertically for my nightmarish ewes to jump out one by one.
To takes good care of my sick memories
To open windows widely
Letting my soul ascend like a revered queen,
The Archangel to deliver a grandiose eulogy,
And the Red Indians to bring fire to the words,
To put a bouquet of roses on my corpse.
The doctor had to cut my finger off
And to single out for my ring, which was gifted to me by a Gravedigger in a dark forest.
The doctor had to tie the ghosts with my arterial ropes
Smells the scent of women who snatched the light cubes from the balcony of my heart
Texts that died by gunshot
At the Interchange of madness
The doctor had to separate the rock from my arched back
To fill the void of morgue with my oppressed years.
The doctor had to think carefully
To open fire on nostalgia birds
To lure the goose of thinking into the oblivion garden.
He had to fight the monster hidden in my bones
He had to refute the crow’s argument.
To carry my corpse in his limousine
To be a fancy dinner for loose dogs.
^^^
In a acquainted tone, the doctor said:
Soon, my son, you will lose your chestnut eyes.
You’ll lose the outside world.
The light will let you down in critical places
You will not see in front of your house the sun
Distributing flashlights over the elements
You won’t see a willow tree
Fighting with one leg
Since one hundred years
You will never see the wrinkled bus
Who spent his life crowded with ghosts.
You will not see your brunette neighbor
Hanging apron of remorse on the clothesline.
You won’t see any butterfly drinking light with its tiny wings.
But you can see with Imagined eyes
Will sigh the beat of things from your ears’ vessel.
You can go to your heart
In seclusion
To help you carry the loads of the tactile senses.
^^^
Carlos told me
Don’t be sad, Dad
Not a single fish died in my head aquarium
I did not forget my neighbor villagers
While they were burying their dead in my mind
To the rhythm of the of goats’ bells.
I have not forgotten the blond devil
Who neighs in my veins.
I will fight the monsters of old hours,
The sounds filled with pebbles and moss
I’ll strike the day on its back like a lost fox.
Oh dad
Do not be sad
In prison over time
The warden becomes with a thousand eyes
As if he was a goblin from “a thousand and one nights”,
Or conductor of an orchestra in a tent,
Zarqa al Yamama. (*)
The sun is almost blind here
Enters through the windows like a pregnant woman
To be intercourse with prisoners stealthily
Then she disappears before the guards detect her.
Carlos is a good son
He sips fine whiskey
In every night raid
Planning a military coup
To expel the blind fate from the hegemony
And arrest of spies and chunky words to the void
He has never hurt a bird’s feelings
He did not open fire on his evil childhood
He did not kill a priest in the Titanic
He loves dolphin dance at noon
He only learned to draw coffins and charred corpses
And laying mines in the rear of bad luck
Carlos will break the world
He will write a song about the sailors’ death
The ship sinking to the bottom of the prison.
________________________
(^) In pre-Islamic Arabian tradition, Zarqa’ al-Yamama was a blue-eyed woman with exceptional intuition, keen sight, and ability to predict events before they happened.
