[Saniyya Salih was born in Misyaf, Syria in 1935. She won numerous awards early in her life and published several collections of poems including Narrow Time (1964), The Ink of Execution (1970), and Poems (1980). She died in 1985 following a battle with cancer. She was married to the Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut]

The Trial

Saniyya Salih

I am the hostage woman

Predecessors claim me; so do successors

I snatch myself from the mouth of the two voids

I dream of the end of the universe,

Perhaps human glory witnesses the end

Waits long until civilizations

Lovers and peoples expire,

Or maybe migrate,

And earth remains for me,

Only me,

For me to be Eve the wonderful.

But I woke up,

And found that spears surround me.

It was a dream, O judges.

Your honors the judges

Autumn tears up its crust

Frightened of emptiness and solitude

Speechless, sleepless,

Wandering alone in sand streets

Absorbed in its thoughts

Announces migration

But soon returns captivated

By love for the homeland.

Flares its fires and sows its cinders.

But who harvests it,

While in its depths there are empires

And armies dismantled

Despite their burnished buttons?

The armies who encamp in the liver’s kingdoms

Or lunge after the bowels with their penetrating ammunition

Pull their day from the Souks

So that the sap of the self goes not

Inside the fall forests

In the body’s anterior temple.

O sirs

These are my rivers

Driving their water production

To the mouth of the ocean.

The tax that you imposed is forcibly taken.

I thrust it to the inside of its coffers

Where its gold and memories are hoarded

Where empires sleep

With eyes filled with tears.

They recline on its rungs

Or stretch on its sands.

It deals with the body and the soul

As though old customers

But when hungry devours them.

…

O judges

The words of justice between your teeth

Are not for masticating.

Spit them out, here, in the palm of my hand,

For me to embrace them,

I push them in front of the mouths,

I bathe in them.

…

Or else…

To what use is that water

That turns inside me

If it is not heading towards the great oceans

Where tears of the wretched heave?

Then welcome, O eternal roaring

O rising scream.

For me to split that obscure roar

I carry the burden of my death.

They counsel me to accept it,

That death,

And beguile me into surrendering to it.

However,

The wind tears off a limb from my body,

I rush after it, and recover it.

Thus wars raged on the entrances of the body

Where a man of copper stands

Arresting what escapes from the self.

…

O judges

You advised me pain and vagrancy,

Deprivation,

Bearing of wounds,

And I bore them until my bones bended

You advised me speed,

They say that the big universe traverses

But what has it got to do with my heart?

I will make a tunnel of love

And flee…

Maybe I will get ahead of the thieves and tyrants and killers

From whose spittle is the ink of sacred History…

With it are recorded cold longings

And dead ideas,

Time’s farces,

And memory’s depth.

Where do we drop off the load, O sirs?

Here in front of your tribunes?

Or in the open air?...

Where lightning grants me its fire

So I expand through it

And the lake is its mirror

So I reach myself,

I reach the head’s dark rooms

And where thunder opens my ears for prophecies?

[Translated from the Arabic by Gaelle Raphael]