Monday, September 15, 2014

BE OF HATE 
A LITTLE MORE CAREFUL 
THAN ANYTHING 

Poem for Today - Saturday - September 20, 2014



WHEN I KILLED MY LOVE

I hated you, till there was nothing
but my terrible hate to converse with.
Into it I poured tomorrow's blood
and drowned my present.
I fed it the fire of curses, revolution and revenge,
inflicted my cries of hatred upon it in my dark song,
sustained it with the sleep of the dead
and drew a curtain of ghosts and gloom around it.

I despised your name,
its shadows and echoes.
I loathed its colour and tune,
rhythm and form
and the rough memories
which fell, were consumed
and dwelt in eternity all in a moment:
and I was resurrected as a new poem
which says that the past is only a word.

Victory was mine as you fell,
a statue over a cliff.
I came to bury the pieces under the grief of the cypress.
Hungrily my spade split the earth,
and touched
a cold and frightful foot.
I proudly dragged to the light
—Whose corpse? the remains of regret ...
The night was a mirror where I beheld my hatred
and my dead past, but not the centre of my being.
I knew then,
having killed you in my cup and night
and borne my murdered slowly to the grave—
knew, by the lugubrious hue of my face
that I had only killed myself.

(May 12,1952)

© Nazik al-Mala’ika (1923-2007)
pages 78-79 in When
the Words Burn,
An Anthology of
Modern Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,
translated by John Mikhail Asfour

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