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.

The fall

I live between fire and plague

with my language, with these mute worlds.

I live in an apple orchard and a sky,

in the first happiness and the drollness

of life with Eve,

master of those cursed threes,

master of fruit.

I live between clouds and sparks

in a stone that grows, in a book

that knows secrets, and knows the fall.

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

Not a star

Not a star, not a prophet's inspiration

not a pious face worshiping the moon,

here he comes like a pagan spear

invading the land of alphabets

bleeding, raising his hemorrhage to the sun.

Here he comes wearing the stone's nakedness

thrusting his prayers into caves.

Here he comes

embracing the weightless earth.

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