2 minute read
Ashraf Aboul-Yazid A STREET IN CAIRO
Evenings
1.
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Looking for unused faces In the piles of destroyed masks To conceal – When I meet you –Some sadness used to cover The continent of my heart.
2. Being tortured by some songs I threw my ears beyond the noisy silence.
To hear the same repeated news.
3.
Before the thousand closed doors Of the palace of sorrow in my heart I stand, Without a key.
4.
I tie the stone of silence to my head And fall, In the sea of sleep, Like an anchor splitting The ocean’s breast!
5.
Rising from my head, The memory of death grows, To fall in my inkpot. It makes the passed away people scattering as letters do in the wind’s hands. Those are the crossing illusions
In my heart, I shall never feel calm, Till my heart puts its anchor
In the skin of darkness.
6.
I tell my daughter a story
Before she sleeps, But we are always attacked by night Before the prince of our tale Meets the lady with the crystal shoe.
7. Shut the window of the day in the face of last night’s dreams.
To cry behind the curtains of my forgotten days.
Benha1
As a tit on the River Nile breast
Benha sleeps, and pours Its honey in my dreams.
I wonder, when I come home If I could remember all its roads?
Or if Benha remembers my face With the new tired roads Engraved on it?
1The poet’s home town on the River Nile
Love
When I visited my old school, And went in my old classroom, The boy who sat on my old desk, Did not look like me in my childhood…
Never! But I loved him!
Ashraf
Rain In the heavy rain No one feels A lonely drop.
A Street in Cairo
The man who returned home, In his short break, Does not have but two days:
A day for his arrival, And a day for getting ready to the departure.
A day to cry on seeing her, And a day for her to cry on the farewell scene.
A day to open his arms for friends, And a day for hugging their mirage.
A day to tell them about the war, And a day for their tales of the war’s victims.
A day
For
life, And a day for an eternal death.
The man who returned home, In his short break, remembers:
When the war started, They put targets on his eyes, They closed his mouth with the tank nozzle, and how he died before smelling the gunpowder.
The man who returned home, In his short break, Is welcomed by a street in Cairo, And two sidewalks, Where he poured in the distance between them The sands of his exiled deserted body, Counting the papers burned in The lost wars, Under the fire and light poles.
The man who returned home, In his short break, Is similar to this street where The processions of sadness pass, Leaving nothing but pain.
A street in Cairo
Deserted for two thousand years,
