Maybe these words make no sense
Maybe they mean everything
Your embrace was
a flock of doves
eating from my hand
The waves have stripped off their effort
and put mine on
Like how life flows from your eyes
and my eyes lap it up
like how the ghost of poetry came falling down on me
from a window in the sky
your absence was
a thirsty glass
in your absence I was
light
drenched in dew
My sun is happy
when it sips its day from your spirit
Your absence is happy
when it slings a bridge
between the smoke of the poem
and its fire
Where are you
ghost of ink
drowned in the light of exile
or does home
still darken your soul?
Everyone for themselves
and God for everything
This loss has whitened my days
and broken the night
with the milk of freedom
My words, where does the meaning begin,
and where will it end
Letters that say everything
are lethal letters
I am a migrant bird
and love is my wings
if I see the sky tiring
I’ll tell her to rest
One ear is enough for you to hear the sea
one eye lets
your soul soak in the blue
one palm tree can
mix love and peace
in the glass of meaning
for the wind to drink
Let’s escape to love
let’s get out of the picture
let’s dangle our souls from the rope of imagining
let’s wash time, our time, in a smile
if you damage a poem
the wing of a dove will treat it
if poetry is damaged
life will die
Each time a poem escapes
it increases in wonder
Notes on this poem
Adil Latefi’s poems are like conversations. God’s Mountain is written in natural sentences, and among his pieces here is a poem written in Moroccan Arabic, ‘Laughing Blue’ (Adil was the only Arabophone poet in our cohort with any writing in a regional variety of Arabic).
As a speaker of imperfect Arabic, I find that the (in my opinion) essentially formal nature of Modern Standard Arabic – the literary dialect employed in the vast majority of writing – can obscure the nuances of register which readers of English are used to. Profanities can be particularly tricky, so I was grateful to be able to sit with Adil and hear him translate the word awghād in ‘God’s Mountain’ as ‘motherfuckers’, which I kept. In fact, I often found myself rescuing the humour and sexiness behind the apparently formal language, which would be clear enough to an Arabic speaker who reads his work and is familiar with the rules of this game, but requires a little more teasing out for an uninitiated audience. Here’s an example: ‘and we are knocking on your ivory door | […] | my language, come – I unbutton the holiness of your meaning and strip you of your crown’ – it’s almost enough to make you blush.
