Did you say civilisation?
My abode is the crossroads of the ages:
The Gardens of Babylon
Are hanging on the wall,
In which rivers nearly flow, and birds swim in the sky.
And there stands the sentinel of my gate:
A Sumerian lion.
Soothsayers are gazing
From the balconies of the miniatured Nineveh on my desk.
A fragment of a handle from an old jar -
I see in the blueness of its clay,
The thirst of men who are melted in the sands of time.
Don't you hear Sinbad in the drawing room?
Jinns in his saddlebag, he spins yarns,
How often he forgets what he was telling,
His handmaids are painted on bowls, painted on platters.
They have embroidered verses on their robes:
Implying virtue but insinuating fornication.
Their anklets tinkle with beauty,
And their feet are not unlike buds of cotton and henna,
A cascaded brook when they bend down,
And when they rise, a bird hovering over a twig.
They have embroidered verses on their robes,
Implying virtue but insinuating fornication.
Bit by bit they strip the bark from their twigs.
This is my abode,
The roots are shooting up with songs
But whence comes the mysterious wailing?
How a buzzing silence lurks in the instrument of music,
The waters flow, but I hear something of thirst in the waves.
The air blows, why is it hard to breathe?
Why do lungs shrink and breathing is sticky in the trachea?
Thus the hedges round the house are swollen with roaring.
Whence are anxieties engendered like dizziness,
The earth rocks and the bed is made to stagger.
Did you mention civilisation?
Don't mention the night,
The city seems listening for a coming foray.
She falls down unconscious, how long is a single night!
As if destruction lies hidden beneath the stagnant highways,
Silence is so thundery in the crowded darkness.
The corridors of the habitation are hissing,
The ceiling rocks to and fro.
I hear bolts slide open
As if the wind with claws of hungry wolves,
Like a thunderous guffaw at a wake.
I sleep and I rise on a single thought.
When people of bridled cities sleep,
They sleep with swelling of their bodies,
As if ants crawl in their bones,
Migraine worms split their skull.
When they wake, they are diminished.
Why does the fearful man become even smaller and smaller?
When sleep enters me and my soul surrenders,
I listen to the tumult of the swelling,
To the ants crawling in the bones,
To the migraine splitting the skull.
When thunder rumbles I say there it is, an assassination,
And if lightning flashes I say it is a coup.
I sleep and I wake with one single thought.