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  • Ramallah
  • Ghassan Zaqtan (bio)
    Translated by Fady Joudah (bio)

She remembers, calmly, that journey to the hills the Haddadin eased with surprise and where white children were left to loot the night’s narrators and the hyena’s paths and where a woman’s fright is her sleep amid thorns and stones as she whispers her charm in sleep . . . as if gold bracelets came out of Mecca at dawn to wear her sweat-drenched wrists.

She recalls or remembers roads and mills and water in rock holes villages dangling around like bedouin necklaces and a sky of pale ceramics carpenters seeking trees stonemasons split by the mountain’s dreams fruit pressers on the hills and caravans of forgotten merchants encircling the ruins.

And she calmly remembers the sounds of sleep the death of Christians and boats with black masts that have crossed the plains since the beginning of time slow sails and the longing of the tower and the convent’s bell as she walks besides him among the people.

And when she’s distracted, she sees with eyes closed . . . that her Christians on the roads walk in the miracle as they were born that the Hebrews at the gate are taken by the sound of the horn and the Semitic Arabs on the towers, behind the wall, and underground patiently water time . . . [End Page 1245]

Ghassan Zaqtan

Ghassan Zaqtan, poet, novelist, playwright, and editor, was born in Beit Jala near Bethlehem. He is author of a number of books, including Tarteeb al’Wasf (poems), The Narrow Sea (a play), and Describing the Past (a novel). Some of his poems have been translated into English and published in such venues as Modern Poetry in Translation, Banipal, PBS Online, and Masthead. Co-founder and director of the House of Poetry in Ramallah, Zaqtan has also served as an editor for Bayader, the PLO’s literary journal, Al-Ayyam, a daily newspaper in Ramallah, and Al-Shou’ara, a poetry journal.

Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah, a Palestinian American physician, is author of The Earth in the Attic, which received the Yale Series for Younger Poets award in 2007. He is the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s collection The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press). Joudah, a native of Austin, Texas, lives in Houston.

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