Basim Furat
(All poems edited by Mark Pirie from the Arabic. Individual translators credited.)
Coming To Be
Translated by Abdul Monem Nasser
My father:
An ancient sadness;
My mother:
A book of sadness.
When my father opened the book,
I came to be.
To language of light I lead the candles
Translated by Abbas El Sheikh
What dream that dries my childhood
What dream that cracks my mornings
I am the last in the caravan of solitude
My whinnying is leaning on a desert
Flooded with mourning
And jogging under rains and the splinters of bombs
How can I let my forgetfulness
Disperse its memories in the direction of pain
And not cry: Oh homeland, bring me back
My innocence
So it can be stripped of everything
But the black garment!
I am touching my blood
Lonely in the parade’s square
My echo is shooting the wind
And destroying my papers
Now there are no shadows for my solitude to be upright
How can I wet my forgetfulness
With the dawn of amulets
And the Arabian jasmine’s stream of pain?
The beginning was two firebrands
Hastening the horizon
And whinnying at the door
Without answers
The beginning was to trim my sadness
Sagging under the weight of my dream
And now I am counting the fires of my life
My fires protrude in my memory
I have the language of shooting stars
And the lust of Archipelagos which the
Poems are unable to endure
There is no guide for my compass
Except sadness
And the dawn is packaged in testimony
To my past
I lament you, O defiance!, because your wings
Are two nooses for daylight
While the sea lets the sunset escape to identityless shore
The dusk is the geography of our blood -
Myself and Baghdad …
We sit on a shore we know
Sipping our destruction
Oh Baghdad …
Night is drying your darkness
By my light!
Peace resides on the farewell handkerchiefs which
Are dried by the rain of waiting
Peace dwells in the gowns of tears which are
Our history without doubt
I alone fill the rivers with songs
And memories
And strip the waves from their hallucinations
I am proud of my destruction
And with my destruction I scrape the rust
From the clouds
Like I scrape from my childhood the
Warplanes and trenches
I have the times of myrtle and Narcissus,
And while they are drowning in his image
I write to myself:
My mistakes
Are a coffin
Chasing me, uttering a language
That was lost by its own alphabet
Until it became homeless,
Like nations decayed from divulgence
In the cage of wishes
My mistakes:
I am my mistakes,
The mistakes of my father:
A mistake that is repeated,
My mother is a mistake awaiting a mistake
Due to a mistake,
I am a mistake counting my steps and
Make a mistake
How can I let my forgetfulness splinter?
The datepalms are brimming and moaning
I am the Sumerian
Who is heavily armed
With dreams and questions
I tentatively
Shake nostalgia from my fingers
I freeze inside my life
I shake trying in vain to remove fear from
My pillow
I caress the sweetness of the forests
And cover the shyness of the sea
Before the flighty waves
I lead the candles to light
And mend their patience
Not caring for eternity
Without caring for their fading too
I snatch the horizons and leave
I am the paradise of myself and its doomsday
I point to basil slowly
And gradually the fields flow on my bed
The shores sprinkle their wailing near me
While tears flow through windows of waiting
My longing sneaks away discreetly
I feel it
I plough in daytime
And it ploughs me at night
My yearning drags the river to its desert
And its thirst to sky
And it wails before the oneness of
Its innocence
My longing is praying in the hearth of its quarrels
Carrying the firebrand in its agony
Now, which alley will open its shirt for a stranger?
I suspend my defeats on the walls
And make nostalgia my pillow
I am but the last in the caravan of solitude
And because there are no glories to gild my life
My dreams have left me and gone
I leave my sighs on the windows
And at the doors I leave my defeats
Suicide
Translated by Abbas El Sheikh
The voice of the skies has cracked from her pagan silence,
The violet sings in lust for her smile
And the angels supplicate for the fading grief
Between her eyes.
My love ...
May the wilderness gather the remains
Of a passion moaning in your hands,
A passion of cooing
A passion of departure,
A passion of the poem in exile
Which recites a wailing for her roving poet
Between the dust of dating or the rain of memory.
Why was I burnt by the warmth of her turning?
I might be the last of the returnees
From the maze of her pastoral forests,
Pasturing my suicide
While it is resorting to the bleeding of the sublime question:
Why am I in love with you?
The fingers of my soul play with your hair.
Inhabited by bleeding
Translated by Abbas El Sheikh
Those who light my candle
Their departure is emaciated
And their destruction is suspended
In remote regions of life.
Their trees became red for my sunrise
Embroidering my streams with shadowless stars.
Those who ignite their dreams in exile -
I wish they could inattentively reproduce in
The palms of my hands
And never permit the mirrors to
Reincarnate in me.
The handles of my gates are rusty;
And yet their fading waving is awake
On my doorstep;
They pierce my shirt with the myrtle
And forget my wound on the house’s table;
Just like I forget the day I guarded their steps.
I teach Henna how to dance in my fingers
And the sign of carnation is nostalgia.
But here I can only buy for my soil
Flowers that aren’t Arabian jasmine;
Even if the cooing is a stable memory -
Those who light my candle are inhabited by bleeding.
No Looking Back
Translated by Abdul Monem Nasser
You kindled yearning
In your corners
And you raised your longing
As a banner
For all who arrive and depart.
You did not say farewell
To those who turned your life
Into a cesspool,
Brimming with pain.
You blessed them
And moved on
Without looking back.
So, they followed you.
Basim Furat was born in Karbalaa, Iraq, in 1967 and started writing poetry when he was in primary school. His first poem was published when he was still in high school. In early 1993 he crossed the border and became a refugee in Jordan. Four years later he arrived in New Zealand. The death of his father when he was two years old, the fact his mother was left a young widow and his compulsory military service for the Iraqi army in the second Gulf War have had a large influence on his poetry. His poetry has been published all over the world, and has been translated into French, Spanish and English. His first poetry book in Arabic was published in Madrid in 1999 and the second one was published in Amman, Jordan, in 2002. He is a member of the Union of Arab Writers and is the New Zealand co-ordinator for Joussour, an Australasian Arabic/English magazine. In 2004 HeadworX Publishers, Wellington, New Zealand, published his first book of translations in English entitled Here and There.
