Rana al-Tonsi
From A Rose for the Last Days
[l34]	On one foot
like a humiliated beggar I limp past all the swinging doors
and the flags that are taken down from their masts ... The sidewalk was never my friend but it embraced me those times when the crying was tough and bitter
In my country
soldiers go to a war
where they never fight
In every coffeehouse or square
under the feet of the sick, the sad and insane
you can glimpse the trace of a rose
thrown into the arms of nurses
in lonely rooms inhabited by wailing,
a rose drawn in blood.
I cannot believe the car has yet to stop that I fell out of it like a scream I know the lift attendant never jumps off the fences and that rocks keep wounding me even though I've roamed for too long.
On one foot death will come and raise its head Facing it, I will embrace this man strongly and strangle all the poems in his hands I will crush my bones under his hot breaths My lungs are becoming two tubes my feet like a battlefield my heart a noose.
IJEMS
Rana al-Tonsi
Am I really dead?
Only a while ago I was smelling that homeland.
* * *
In those empty streets	[l35]
even dogs are afraid to cross
You will cross empty-handed
with a shadow that doesn't accompany you
and a backbreaking love
You will talk about your parents
the shock of sudden death
and the added light
which never lessens loneliness
When my eyes well up
and my pants are wet
as I stand before you
you will take a newspaper from your chest and a mirror from your eyes so that I may look into them and know
that now I can go out.
* * *
Into one of those swamps
left by an old flood
the kind that drowns entire villages
I will jump like a bird with broken wings —
a bird's looking for a merciful killing
The bird which loved the behinds of every hen can no longer fly or spit
as is his wont every time he mounts his eyes can neither close in sleep nor let a tear fall
VOLUME 4 | 2011 | SPECIAL ISSUE
Rana al-Tonsi
But all the birds agree he does shut them every now and then although no one knows for sure if he does it out of pleasure or out of pain [136]	for a sad bird like him
can only dream of a long darkness
* * *
Every time I think of my own death someone else dies
and the poem keeps writing itself
* * *
I embrace no one my steps pass without me the hand of the house burns me The one who sleeps in my history never wakes
his steps crush me at night In the morning I wake up scared, on his chest He tells me what I was not
He smokes his cigarette
like a returnee from war
He knows the precise number of its victims
and I, between stolen looks
and the sounds of his breathing,
know there was a lost letter from him.
Translated by Sinan Antoon
IJEMS