Come for a soothing stab, Dinoka Breva !
When the packs of wolves drag their rears upon
the snow as they come down from the North,
howling, inflaming the latched barns and the
throats of dogs, I hear the death-rattle of
Dinoka Breva.
(Testimonial)
Over the melon-fields which fence the village,
the sky scattered to reveal a void roofed with
spiders webs and gendarme hats, from where
Dinoka springs up naked, leading a pack of
jackals towards another destination, devoid of
splinters.
(Testimonial)
Dinoka!
What shall I say to those hunters who saddle the
hounds at the hillsides of Sinjar and the
mountains of Abdul Aziz 1? You are hidden
somewhere, perhaps in a zareba, sniffing the
earth and the mangers of the ewes. You are
grand, damp, haunted by the harvest, and haunted
by me.
"Dinoka," I hear your father calling. "Dinoka",
I hear your mother. "Take this barley bread to
the immigrants. Say they may rest awhile."
Their numbers increased day after day. Con-Ling
from Taskent, Khuzestan, Armenia and southwest
Russia, they roamed the Jazira, carrying their
sails and the sheaves of ferns, having neither
shoes nor scythes. You were too young to realize
how much they need water, a madwoman, or a widow
whom they would entomb far in the fissures of
the steppes, so that she might breed lentils and
grasshoppers in those years of emigrations. You
never knew how the furrow between Amuda and
Mosissana 2 overcrowds with carcasses of mules
and amputated limbs. You never knew how the
bedouins get French rifles, and why they rove
along the village frontiers before they raid
with their cloaks twisted around their heads.
You sprang up, it is said, out of the
wilderness, from where Breva came. Yet out
of the wilderness came God, the amazement, and
the bullet cases which the children dig out from
the garbage barrels of the Palace. You returned,
it is said, with a flock of jolly ewes and a
single ram who totters like a warrior over any
urine-wetted spot.
Dinoka ... Dinoka ...
I am weakened. I can no longer hear your voice,
now that I behold the hillsides of Mei,rika 3
and the hay-loaded carts of the Kurds.
A Faraman 4 /The Chase
Daughter of my whoring days,
No more your mule shall hide you, nor the
wilderness, nor the wires. To prolong my chase I
prop up your phantom as it splits and sways.
So let your bird kneel down on a slope, behind
the funeral of my boughs
for I am still attached to the revolving
celestial sphere, to the whispers, and to the
shadow of the guillotine.
Behind the trees
the weavers work their loom, threading the truce
between loneliness and the Universe; behind the
trees my lungs stumbled then lent against dry
trunks and burnt;
I put fire to the poor weavers, they stirred my
flanks and fell down on dry
taking shelter beneath my flowers and my plants,
taking shelter inside the gloves of a woman who
retreats before the bedouins, those horrified in
front of the muzzle of my veins.
Behind the trees were water lamps, the dust
through se your hands melting ...
down, daughter of my whoring days! Neither the
wilderness nor the wires shall hi( you. Beside a
thicket or a mountain we shall
watch my rain
my day leaning down, pulled back and
forth by graciousness, the winds,
and the shadow of the
guillotine.
You shall see the birds of
my heedless blood
(for I vowed to ignore her,
as becomes the gentlemen,
and never have her amidst the
guards and the slave-girls of the
republic)
and shall see my blood
stuffed with sea kings and stuffed with se
city tiles
while I ignore people approaching
and people leaving, and pierce my soles to know
what a tramp knows of those martyrs, outcast
along mausoleum pathways,
to know how my times conclude a truce with me
how steppes cram with a grass that saddens me
(for I am saddened by the lightning as it
sparkles over the flood tides; by the flood as
it overflows ashore; by the shore banished by
the State; by sadness boycotting the State.
Sadness saddens me).
Standing behind you, daughter of my whoring
days,
I summon the jujube leaves to come close to the
amazement of a people: "Hasten to my suburb, 0
leaves of jujube in Syria!" Hasten, by God! For
I am preoccupied with a smoke that shelters me
from the liberty of generations up other
generations; my scope is made of saddles and of
dust inside which I suggest another name for my
water to whose parlor of salamanders and
hyacinths I lead the epochs mammilla, to where
God came upon a breast behind the spike.
Geographers are asleep, 0 leaves of jujube, and
the bullets are filled with secrets of the
grass... 'I am the captain, and my steamer is
the rust of steps." Behold my blood behind you,
all around you stirring an abyss into my abyss
calling upon a herd of mares of dreariness, who
yawn and stretch inside the fences of the soul,
who neigh underneath the gown of Breva, slain by
the strangers and the rite of gods. I choose
vehemence, and tie the bowels of mares to a
stake against which the Circassians and the
Kurds rub the meselves, then stand up swift.
With narcissus and everlasting faith I stamp
their verdant, and trees and birds we leave for
the river,
"Come along, 0 river!
"Come along, 0 mountain!" we say.
"Come along, 0 partridge!
and you, 0 leaves of jujube, come to a desert
bursting out from the hole of the skull!"
I choose vehemence, and urge the moments to sew
the crystals of the heart into the loins of
those figures co
of the Pole foam and the city tiles.
I strive to open up for execution all that
erodes on my lips and my bough,
when the damp body ripens, then drives the
mountain goats of miracle into the furrow of
time when I am taken away by phantoms of
girl-friends who used to incise my orbit. Now
and then I gain a graveyardand some blood, reach
you with both hands carrying chains, from which
droops a jungle of genesis endings, whereof the
wings of the Khabour5 fall. I hug you, economies
the strike,
I hold the tip of your bowels, let you loose,
and there you glide down to the banquet of the
Universe.
(It is now that you cross the slope where the
crane hits you, hires the belly-hollow for the
coming year, lets the tanks hire you for the
year after. In one hundred years the crane moves
with the tanks up the chest-hollow. In
one thousand years, escorted by a battalion of
whelps, the dog roves all around inside your
intestines, urinates on the kidney, the heart,
and the liver.)
I loosened your reins, made my hand
the spinning wheel which spreads your voice over
desert sands,
left the self indulging in the recital of mercy,
and went back to my abyss.
A/ My atoms have no interspace but the rustle of
the pants of winkling rain. - Break up!
- I break UP,
let my death-rattle break up the squares, so
that I might rejoice at the flags sequestering
the Revolution, disputing those who come
unified.
B/ My atoms have no interspace but the pampering
of folks. - Break up!
- I break up,
and threaten those who come to me unified.
C/ My atoms have no interspace but the germ,
come to me,
paramours, subterranean vaults, and paupers who
droop from the telephone poles and hunger. Come
to me melted in the tin of noise so that I
reshape you and hand each his sphere of grenade.
I am your inheritor of women, for I get the
mother on her daughter's bed, unite the two
sisters under the blade of my breath,
and lead your rituals at he port of roses, to
the boats on which are shipped the goddesses and
the days of the Sublime Porte,
overcrowded with alembics of blasphemy.
D/ My atoms have no interspace but the roots of
Khurasan. - Break up!
- I shall not break up in a detention camp, from
which I can penetrate into the plague. Come to
me intrigants and sodomites, come addicts, so
that we take my bells by surprise.
I listened to the world
I listened to Dinoka Breva
I listened to my trait and my slumber
I listened to love, scanning me in the
rarefaction of sedition, initiating a peace
which is time-fused by eyelashes of women
growing denser, women pouring over the chimney
of the poor.
I bless my throat
and patrol the crowd of the poor who barricade
the roads of their villages, who get intoxicated
by the royal thunder as it comes with its dangle
wrapped up in raw silk mantles. I get
intoxicated as they fling their testicles
beneath the space of my chase,
and I guffaw in a basement connected to the
springs of people,
and as the people deliver me to the rain and the
birds I call out:
Break up!
You and all those beggars of warts in this
metropolis of the epoch.
I bless my throat
and while stopping in a valley, under the sun's
vacuities, I hustle the barking of the flags:
"Stone and horses
stone and white treason's
FOETRT
stone and white masts."
A soldier among the pagan soldiers I walk out
from my homeland and my traditions, with bees I
go astray, nourishing myself on the flowers of
the
So let death replete my soils
let the river be the messenger of execution,
whom I escort with news, just until I reach the
mosque of my ancestors, 1, the swimmer in closed
ruby and in closed days,
stab the common language of dreams, transform
the face of
Atlantic
into a balcony of a whore who gets ready for the
ghostly
caravan.
And I let my lower body roam the farmland in
which the tear
intertwines with the lily,
and for my mates I shall leave some spouts along
the riversides of eternity.
The flags on the hills arrest my attention: "We
have awakened in the eastward of the dream,
asked you to enjoy the desert, to t barefooted
to the softness of your summer bed." And the
flags stormed my odor, waited in the water
saloon, then the eternity waited fill I
accompany the revelation t(
the edges of its buds
or strike the lilac of the souls with my cane,
so that its wisdom shall breed kids who set out
to the Mass of
darkness.
And there are dears untranslatable, but whom I
translate'
"Each deer is a commencement."
And on the hills I translate the flags: "We
awoke to see you are splinter, who moves the
sand family to the helmet, and the Arab to a
certain memory in the
sodium of the Universe;
we called you by your name,
we called you in the name of the diamond and the
coral; helpless you were and like the muscles
your destinations slackened down and slackened
you, and the ants were busy recollecting what
falls from you onto the earth, cell
by cell
by cell
to the
there when you are reborn in the shape of a
creature who is compressed into stones of ante
Christum, stones of
anno Domini;
We saw you cry out: I am the Brahman of the
ants! And thus -we slew you."
I bless my throat
and flag by flag, under the cloud vacuities, I
hustle my daylight towards the spike of Dinoka:
"What does someone like me do but comer and
slaughter someone like you, examine your limbs
afterwards, come up insane, to ask death for the
man and death for the sea, death for all raw
metals and oxids which the future might
embellish to create its genes?
What can I do behind the trees
sniffing you out, sniffing the smell of hay, of
clouds and tubes which the boorish gendarmes
confiscate from the mules of woodcutters. You
are surely running to see me, carrying
sandalwood and gunpowder, fearing that my dreams
hurt my dreams, and going around an arch which
links my banks to the banks of the body, thrown
there under the sycamore lanterns. Here you are,
wading across the riversides, your hands holding
the bundled dress, your hands rising up,
fluttering, fearful not to wet the dress,
gushing bubbles out of the history of the
thighs, inscribing moony messages for the
celestial bodies. Surely you are kidnapping the
river keys from those lives tom deep down the
alluvium weddings, thrusting through its upper
and lower ashes, reaching
out to the parlous of my disruptions.
There you are, dressed only in spades covering
the forehead and the hips. I come closer and
design our lust inside the circle of the
woodcutters, the gendarmes, the sound, the land
and the POPPY. I come closer, and move our lust
into the craw of the starling, then on we walk
to our appointment with the trees."
Amidst the vacuities of geography, whom shall I
awake to witness for and against me, now that
the massacre prays for rain, in front of those
basins upon which God and the hemisphere go
apart? I begged the valley to race the echoes of
my wings as they reach kneeling cottages and
school-girls who hail me from behind the school
walls. I begged an adult who jogs the hot and
the cool, the dry and the fresh. I begged him to
wear in that ceremony where democrats are to be
crowned successor of the heart domains.
'Let that heart calm down!" I cry out
and gaze at every tramp who ties his waterwheel
to anoint me as chief of the virginals, and
listen to the national bird gossips about me
with his national neighbor, how the palm tree
prepares to meet me,
while L standing behind the pebble of history
and the darkness of trees, stir an abyss into my
abyss,
plug the punctures in the planets of my
followers, using corks and corded happiness,
facing folks who come from the province of
magic, to oppose and judge me.
( I fought while the lords were busy measuring,
from their hotel balconies, the surface of my
sorrow and the Laws of Terror, where two angels
of snow hovered above the navel of Dinoka).
And I face folks who fill my courtroom
with lamps of their elements; who discovered me,
and for whom I revealed the reason of fire,
turned back to the reverence of my thunder.
performed the ablution so that I get slain in
summer, the time when the waves
resemble me and the fronds woo me,
when the nymphs surprise me beside the tributary
of the Tigris holding their notebooks, on which
I use fatal words to dictate species like
fireworks and occupied memory. And then I leave,
shall leave tomorrow, heading for a future that
retreats or rotates around a comer of pre-human
confines; I listened to the man patching his
present and dying; and so I ran to the spike so
that she lets Dinoka know I am coming bringing
excuses written on papers, lest I stutter as I
face her,
my abyss coming with me.
Beirut ,1972
______________________________________
1 Names of two major mountains in the
northeastern part of Syria.
Towns in the Jazira, of Kurdish population.
3 A village in the Amuda district.
4 The Ottoman decree.
5 A small river in the jazira.
Translated by Subhi Hadidi
Illustrations by the poet
This poem, written in 1972 yet still
inaugurating the poet's first collection,
established Barakat as the talented
poet-chronicler who brilliantly submerges the
links between narrative and fantasy, physical
actualities and their secret inscriptions on the
mind, primitive incarnations of exceptional
mimetic elements and simple visual imagery of
compelling force. The poem evokes the place not
as a directly defined (or definable) entity of
geography, but rather as a discovery of a sudden
open metaphor, an abyss of traumatic loss
interposed between the mostly agonizing
encounters of different communities (Kurds,
Bedouins, Assyrians, Circassians), different
animals (wolves, hounds, jackals, ewes),
different birds (cranes, partridges, quails),
different plants (ferns, jujubes, lilies,
hyacinths), and, ultimately, different
narratives of the one history extended here as a
myth unfolding violently.
