What to leave behind

Go on, move, go and embrace the waves and the air
and lift with your eyelashes lightning and clouds.
Let them shatter
our mirror then, and the vessel of years.
And leave for us behind you -
No, no, leave nothing behind
except some sorrow and some mud
and the blood dried up in veins.

Ah, go on, move. No, wait, you're
not leaving, are you?
If so leave for us behind you
your eyes, your tawny corpse, your clothes,
a poem for the strange,
the world borne of longing
holding in its eyelashes
your sky.

Adonis, Selected Poems (de Songs of Mihyar of Damascus, 1961), Khaled Mattawa (trad.), Yale/Margelios, 2010.