Fatima Qandil - Spiky voids that move suddenly

Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers April 2024

Spiky voids that move suddenly

Keys that open doors

Are the keys that close doors

And the keys hanged in chains

Only has the drama of resonance

But the key that dies in my pocket

Reminds me that it’s time

To be a sensible woman

That lives in a house

Without keys... without doors...

****

A shooting star is hiding

Before we see its features

Before we knew that

It is the same shooting star.

Everything I saw in my heart after that Is a sunken feet

Then the blood prevented traces.

****

How I loved a man like a black star

Who stripped me of all the men I loved

The joy of orphanhood.

*****

Darkness eats the full moon

Then it rises trembling

The scythe of defeat.

*****

Why do you imagine the family scene

As water falls on the sides of the tractor?

*****

I say, Ziad, I am your mother

And you will not be

I say, Ziad: My uterus is in fragments

How can I settle you?

*****

Every day

In metro expressway

A dilapidated house flashes

With an external wooden ladder

And an iron door

Always open every day

Until it became my home.

© Fatima Qandil

Fatima Qandil (1958) is an Egyptian poet, writer, and academic. She has published many poetry collections, and one of her most prominent works is the novel Empty Cages, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature in 2022.