Fermentation, poems by Osama Esber

Osama Eber is a Syrian poet, short story writer, photographer and translator who presently lives in California. He is an editor in Salon Syria, Jadaliyya’s Arabic section, and an editor in Status audio magazine. Among his poetry collections are: Screens of History (1994); The Accord of Waves (1995); Repeated Sunrise over Exile (2004); and Where He Doesn’t Live (2006). His short story collections are entitled The Autobiography of Diamonds (1996); Coffee of the Dead (2000); and Rhythms of a Different Time (in process). He has translated into Arabic works by Alan Lightman, Richard Ford, Elizabeth Gilbert, Raymond Carver, Michael Ondaatje, Bertrand Russell, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and Noam Chomsky, to name a few. He attended the international writing program in Iowa in 1995.

These poems are translated from Arabic.

Fermentation

The sun fermented its light in the sands to intoxicate me. clouds dissolved as ink and I tried to translate a language whose letters flew in the wind or the drizzle or merged with the rays. I was not separated. I felt I was flowing in the river of things.

Light lies on the sand and suddenly jumps like a fox or flies like a hawk. I don’t see its feet or wings but I follow its visit to things, the sound of its breath in their ears. I see it sliding on your skin more brilliant as if a sun in you feeds it with more glow. You walk on the beach. I walk on the roads of the blue escaping my memory, the images of the dead, the murals of death. the graves that open their mouths. black holes in the souls of cities.

Letters, that the sea whispers to my cells and return me to myself when I look at you I feel I am a wave that does not want to reach the shore.

The Wind Did Not Tell Me

The wind didn’t tell me anything. It only blew. bearing its snack of leaves and dust. Our love did not yet flower. We sought warmth in sadness, the only thing alive in us, the only wood burning in the stoves of our souls, because death demarcated borders and distributed the country on its graves.

The wind of the absurd took their bodies as leaves fallen from the trees of their youth before the opening of flowers before the ripeness of fruits before the shadows’ offering of their gifts to a passerby.

Our love was a frightened bud on the bough of a casual meeting when we silently sat as if listening only to the wind of separation that did not say anything except its blowing.

A Piece of Wood

A piece of wood, the sea cast on the sands. It was a leafy road on which fruit used to walk. It was something to lean on, a threshold of presences that showed their faces.

The bark was peeled off but it seemed like a skin in which the voids of exile accumulated; I felt like it is a hand, a hand that moved its fingers to shake hands with me. Honestly, I felt the touch of its fingers and walked the beach as a mad man searching for a pen and paper, for a lute or guitar to convey the message.

© Osama Esber/liveencounters.net