THE CROSS 

FROM ANOTHER VIEWPOINT 

Poem for Today - September 14, 2014

CHRIST AFTER CRUCIFIXION

After they took me down I heard the winds

in a long wail skim the palm trees

and the steps fade.

The wounds

and the cross they nailed me to for the whole afternoon

did not kill me, though. And I listened: the wailing

travelled across the field between me and the city

like the rope that pulls on the ship

while it sinks to the depths. The lamentation was

like a string of light between the morning

 and the darkness in the bleak winter sky.

And then the city drowsed upon its affairs.

When mulberry and orange trees bloom,

When the village of Jaykur extends to the limits of the imagination—

when it flourishes with grass, its fragrance sings

and the suns suckle it with their light.

When even the darkness of the night turns green

the warmth touches my heart, and my blood runs in its soil.

My heart is a sun when the sun throbs light;

my heart is the earth, brings forth wheat and flowers and pure water;

My heart is the water, my heart is a stalk of wheat,

its death is resurrection: it lives in him who eats of it

in the dough which is shaped into loaves

and swells like a small breast, like the breast of life.

I died by fire: I burnt the darkness of my clay,

but the god was untouched.

I was a beginning: and in the beginning were the poor.

I died that the bread might be eaten in my name,

that they might plant me in season.

How many lives will I live? In every pit

I have grown into a future, a seed,

a generation, in every heart that has

a drop, or droplet of my blood.

When I returned and Judas saw me

his secret—he turned yellow.

He was darkened by me like a shadow, the statue of a dispirited idea

that would, he feared, reveal death in the moisture of his eyes ...

(His eyes are of rock;

with them he covers his grave from the people)

Afraid of its warmth, of never realizing it, he had told all.

`—You! or has my shadow blanched, been scattered with light?

You proceed from the world of death, but death comes once!

So said our fathers, so they taught us; can it be false?'

This he thought when he saw me, and this his glance said.

A running step, steps.

The grave will collapse under these steps.

Have they come? Who but they?

A step—another.

I place the rock on my chest.

Didn't they crucify me yesterday? Here I am in my grave.

Let them come; I am in my grave. Who knows

that I am ... who knows?

And Judas' friends, who will believe what they claim?

A step ... a step.

Here I am now naked in my dark grave.

Yesterday I was furled like doubt, like a bud;

the flowers of blood dripped under my snowy shrouds.

I was like the shadow between night and day

until I exploded my very being in a shower of treasures,

stripped it like fruits.

When I cut my pocket into swaddling clothes,

and my sleeve into a blanket

when I warmed the bones of the children one day with my flesh—

when I undressed my own wound to bandage the wounds of others,

the wall fell between God and myself.

The soldiers surprised even my wounds and the throbs of my heart:

surprised all that was not death, though in a cemetery.

They surprised me as a fruitful palm tree is surprised

by a flock of hungry birds in a deserted village.

The eyes of guns block my path.

Levelled, they plot with their fire my crucifixion—

with iron and fire: but the light of the skies,

remembrance and love are the eyes of my people.

They carry the burden for me, bedew my cross, so that how small

is that death—my death—and how big!

After they nailed me, and I turned my eyes to the city

I could barely distinguish field, wall, or cemetery.

Like aa flourishing forest, there extended

As far as the eye could see, in every domain a cross  and a sad mother

At the childbirth of the city!

[Summer 1957]

Badr Shakin al-Sayyab (1926-1964)

Pages 140-143 - in

When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of Modern

Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour