Black Horses
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The enemy’s dead think mercilessly of me in their eternal sleep while the ghosts take the stairs and house corners the ghosts that I picked off the road and gathered like necklaces from others’ necks and sins.
Sin goes to the neck…there I raise my ghosts, feed them and they swim like black horses in my sleep.
With the energy of a dead person the last Blues song rises while I think of jealousy the door is a slit open and breath enters through the cracks, the river’s respiration, the drunks and the woman who wakes to her past in the public garden…
and when I fall asleep I find a horse grazing grass whenever I fall asleep a horse comes to graze my dreams.
On my desk in Ramallah there are unfinished letters and photos of old friends, a poetry manuscript of a young man from Gaza, a sand hourglass, and poem beginnings that flap like wings in my head.
I want to memorize you like that song in elementary school the one I carry whole without errors with my lisp and tilted head and dissonance… the little feet that stomp the concrete ground with fervor the open hands that bang on desks… [End Page 1243]
All died in war, my friends and classmates… and their little feet, their excited hands, remained stomping the classroom floors, the dining tables and sidewalks, the backs and shoulders of pedestrians… wherever I go I hear them I see them. [End Page 1244]
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, 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.
Footnotes
* “Black Horses” has also been translated by May Jayyusi and Alan Brownjohn for East-West Nexis/PROTA. Their translation was published in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
