El Habib Louai : Two poems

 

The Eternal Refugee

It is dusk and the birds
have found their way home,
needless of a clock, map or sextant
Safe in their nests with a little brood

Things left behind
against circumstances are visualized
Voices resound in the convolutions of the brain
Curling to reach the ones who left
But they remind themselves of the chasm.

Now you are here
On the closest border
The border man will fix you
with the cold eye of a snake
and answer not a word
He will count you and give you a number
amongst the lucky ones
who left everything behind:
your scarves, robes, dresses and makeup
your silver, gold and bills
your freshly cut flowers,
your porcelain pots and pets,
your peevish and discredited gods.

What good is your clinging to unforgotten beauty?
What about the kinsmen and the lost friends?
Your rigorous bonds of blood
With their cold stares and blank faces?
They left your realm with its mundane prerequisites
They are now forming rings and joining hands
In games neither you nor your enemies know.

You said goodbyes and parted ways
In your different modern-day Sinais
You left everything behind
Except your ancestral nightmares
Born of Manichean doctrines
The border man will fix you with a cold eye
Count you and give you a number
You are just now the only lucky one.   

 

 

 

 

It Shall Rise Again When we are Gone

You could sketch it all
On a tiny thumbnail,
The story of the Son of Man

We ran out of insurance
served in timely doses by unseen Gods
We ran out of decent chunks of land
we used to grow food
Now we grow pesky briars, brambles
and some basil in worn-out auto-tire casings
we expose to sunlight in balconies of the garden of life
while fish and reefs perish under poisoned waves
while poor animals suffer and die that we may live

Who do we think we are after all?
Nothing but mere Lone Rangers disguised as prophets.
Some gunslingers pretending to be peacemakers.
A vigilante model of justice with many silver bullets?

Haven’t we enough?
Haven’t we abandoned the whole world
for nothing at all?
Haven’t we plucked all the flowers
leaving them crumpled at the curb’s edge?
For what purpose, but the mere greed,
The mere triumphant pleasure of leaving a trace
of what we call human progress
disguised in shameful disgrace

Then we speak of a common tone
Something we call love
Yet we know nothing of love or its heartaches
We speak of it against our reasons
because it is all we can do when we fail in old age

We are losing light and it is getting late
When we are gone, when we are done with
The sun shall rise and shed its beams
as it has always done
As if it was the first day of the world!

 

 

 

 

El Habib Louai is a Moroccan Amazigh poet, translator, musician and professor of English language and literature at the English department at Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco. He is a contributing member of The European Beat Studies Network. Louai has been awarded Aimee Grunberger scholarship by Naropa University to participate in Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics summer creative writing program, where he performed his Arabic translations of the Beats with Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye and Thurston Moore of the Sonic Youth. His articles, poems, and translations of Moroccan and Beat writers appeared in many national and international literary magazines, journals, and reviews such as World Literature Today, The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature, Xenophile Journal, Beatdom Journal, Mogadored, Madarat Attaqafiya, Arab Lit Quarterly, Rigorous Journal, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, Big Bridge Magazine, Militant Thistles, The Fifth Estate, Al Quds Al Arabi, Arrafid, Al Faisal, Sagarana, Istanbul Literary Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Tower Journal, Charles River Journal, Al Doha, Lumina, The MUD Proposal, the Dreaming Machine. He published two collections of poems: Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar. His Arabic translations include Michael Rothenberg’s Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story, America, America: An anthology of the Beat Poetry, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain, Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Louai's Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar was shortlisted for 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry.