one
How I remember that sublime moment of my first meeting with you, Beirut, and how Al-Burj Square began to reveal the history of the Mediterranean to me, starting from it. Sometimes I dream of that moment as if I was thinking, other times I think of it as if I was dreaming. Perhaps the dream is the great space that joins the shores and horizons.
At that moment when Beirut is torn apart, I ask its citizen, do you really believe that Beirut revolves around the sun? So what do we do with all those moons that claim to be women waiting for their dead lovers? How and when will that sphere of fire between Beirut and the world be extinguished?
two
Beirut? No, it is not a cistern where answers accumulate. If not a womb in which questions are born. That is her haunting, unique, fascinating, and tormenting unknown among her Arab sisters. Quia. Violence, in all its forms, cannot protect or defend it. Sectarianism, especially in its dogmatic, fanatical and hermetic form, is incapable of it.
Beirut is a horizon.
Nothing can close the horizon.
3
Yesterday a boy was born far from Beirut, but he was rocking in his arms. They gave it a name that begins with the letter "A". I imagine him, years later, walking down a street, sitting in a cafe, entering a library, visiting a museum or weaving the beaches of Beirut with his eyes.
I imagine him feeling with my heart the mysterious distance between stars. I imagine him chasing a pigeon that flees from him by jumping. She stays close to him, but he chases her like he's playing games.
Suddenly he bursts into tears, and with his tears
sketch a wing.
4
Does anyone want to be a wave, a cedar branch or a gazelle neck?
Does anyone want to be a brother to the Afqa cave? To be another river within the river of Adonis?
Oh, as if no one was looking for nectar in the mouth of love anymore!
As if no one was wondering when memory will break its chains?
And where do those arteries through which blood flows appear in the sky of Beirut?
The heart is no longer the same, and the head is no longer the head.
Why has the heart become a knife and the head a doll?
Can it be love that leans on the staff of sunset? Who will be the one who cries between the columns and under the arches?
5
Cities ruminate on their ruins, and Beirut contemplates, waits, and talks.
Beirut knows that a true dialogue will only emerge between those who understand all that is essential, temporally and historically, humanly and culturally. Parts whose identity is not a reflection, but on the contrary, a flash and illumination. Thus Beirut knows that all true dialogue is built on the basis of a shared future and the ways to promote it. Said common future implies leaving past and present behind.
Beirut is worth making its own future, grain by grain, moment by moment.
6
I know you Beirut
in your head there is the wonder of the sea that prints on your body the footprints of the sun, prints its steps back and forth, at sunrise and sunset. The misfortune of the light that emanated for the first time from the planet of your alphabet inhabits you. The dark history resides in you, the traps of space and time.
Even so, your head rises to the heights as the surf of history shakes your breasts.
Beirut, I know that your breasts are night and day of the sea.
I know you, Beirut, and I trust your dawn.
7
Women often wake up in Beirut.
In Beirut I know a life dressed in rags that no needle can mend.
In Beirut I move between the curves of despair and withdraw myself to the depths of my imagination.
In Beirut, while the dawn outlines its lights in unknown places and paths, the light extends its arms to me, and the wind begs me to write its first gust to it.
Women often wake up in Beirut.
8
Secretly, in Beirut I learned the complaint of the gods of the trees and the insatiable flowers. As I drank, the water ran from my lips to those of the trees and flowers.
I assured the boy whose name begins with the letter "A" that he would see in Beirut another sun that will only invent new games with him on the beaches and in the lap of the waves.
9
Beirut, since I dedicated to New York for you that epitaph that the world would write, I ask myself: why does my love for you increase, if your confines struggle within the geography of my guts?
Oh, Beirut, so deep is your whisper that every day its dying star descends upon me!
10
Beirut, poetry can only dance you loving. Even when you're mad at her, or she at you.
Together, you are one front in a perpetual war against horizons that spew out plastic rags, against mosses that are about to turn into apples, against bread that tastes like tar, against crocodiles that roam the alleys selling festive cakes.
Beirut, poetry can only dance you loving.
eleven
Beirut, welcome me,
Pick me up under your roof
I am tired of all the cities.
Beirut is my body:
a bloody body with open wounds yet to be received.
12
Al-Burj Square knocks on the doors of memory.
Yes, joy still has roots and sources.
"The voice of the future resounds in my throat," says al-Burj Square.
He adds: Now I wait in the bed of the flame so that the dream does not rust.
Adonis, Syrian poet
Translation of Jaafar al Aluni.