An Attempt to Reach Beirut by Sea
Sargon Boulus
One distant evening
while I smuggle a fountain through the wreckage
or bribe a night with a mediocre poem
You bleed
in the cold trenches of the ceasefire
from your thousand battlefronts
I wanted to lay out a path with a carpet of my breaths
to where you still stand
Your barricade a dove’s skeleton
Your face a wounded paradise
I wanted to burn a little between your hands
No place dreams of my arrival
and Life
My frightened fugitive:
When it opens its eyes
every moment gets ready to be born
in its cradle floating between my bones
I wake upon foreign seas
and my life braces itself against me
Travel agents look at me bewildered
when I ask them about ships going to Beirut
Yet I leave Bari after two days
Bari: the seaport where prophets rust
as their beards waft onto the oars
While on Socrates Street, Athens
where hungry whores sit at hotels’ doorsteps
atop wooden shipping crates lent them by shopkeepers
In the crevices of the Mediterranean and the Aegean
the wind
- a blind widow
looks for no one
Yet sometimes its hands glide/scrape over
- like sandpaper over a heart’s entrances
where red salt gathers, where it pauses
In that moment, Dawn, masked, traverses the bridges
As while I tell Life: draw near!
I vow not to harm you, draw near!
Beirut ascends every night
like a lost scream
from the murdered man’s fixed gaze
Or travels surreptitiously like poverty’s candle
between the ladders resting on the walls of my breast
And while I say:
Do not do a single thing in my absence
I implore you, Life, and in one fell swoop make me see
your stomach perforated by the snipers of the abyss
At night
Beirut tells the Night”
You must go to the heart’s edge
There, I will be your words
You must lick this cold bone
so that its nakedness may illuminate your Night
Embark
so that the smoke may ascend from the compass
Athens, 1979
[Translated from the Arabic by Suneela Mubayi]