January 30: Poet of the Week, Adonis, "The Wound"

The news this weekend of President Trump's ban on immigrants/refugees/travelers from predominantly Muslim countries has bothered me a great deal.  Pope Francis has said that to "call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee" is hypocritical. 

I have chosen Syrian poet Adonis as Poet of the Week, even though the White House probably wouldn't let him enter the country right now.

Saint Marty is tired of mean people and mean politicians and mean Executive Orders.

The Wound

by:  Adonis

1.

The leaves asleep under the wind

are the wounds’ ship,

and the ages collapsed on top of each other

are the wound’s glory,

and the trees rising out of our eyelashes

are the wound’s lake.

The wound is to be found on bridges

where the grave lengthens

and patience goes on to no end

between the shores of our love and death.

The wound is a sign,

and the wound is a crossing too.

 

 

2.

To the language choked by tolling bells

I offer the voice of the wound.

To the stone coming from afar

to the dried-up world crumbling to dust

to the time ferried on creaky sleighs

I light up the fire of the wound.

And when history burns inside my clothes

and when blue nails grow inside my books,

I cry out to the day,

“Who are you, who tosses you

into my virgin land?”

And inside my book and on my virgin land

I stare into a pair of eyes made of dust.

I hear someone saying,

“I am the wound that is born

and grows as your history grows.”

 

 

3.

I named you cloud,

wound of the parting dove.

I named you book and quill

and here I begin the dialogue

between me and the ancient tongue

in the island of tomes

in the archipelago of the ancient fall.

And here I teach these words

to the wind and the palms,

O wound of the parting dove.

 

 

4.

If I had a harbor in the land

of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship,

if I had the remains

of a city, if I had a city

in the land of children and weeping,

I would have written all this down for the wound’s sake,

a song like a spear

that penetrates trees, stone, and sky,

soft like water

unbridled, startling like conquest.

 

 

5.

Rain down on our desert

O world adorned with dream and longing.

Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound,

tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound,

that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands.

 

World adorned with dream and longing

world that falls on my brow

like the lash of a wound,

don’t come close—the wound is closer—

don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful.

That magic that your eyes had flung

on the last kingdoms—

the wound has passed over it,

passed and did not leave a single sail

to tempt toward salvation, did not leave

a single island behind.