Four Poems by Joyce Mansour

[Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) was a Francophone Egyptian poet. She published her first collection in 1953. She moved to Paris and joined the Surrealists and published sixteen books]

 

Blue Like a Desert

 

Happy are the solitary ones

Those who sow the sky in the avid sand

Those who seek the living under the skirts of the wind

Those who run panting after an evaporated dream

For they are the salt of the earth

Happy are the lookouts over the ocean of the desert

Those who pursue the fennec beyond the mirage

The winged sun loses its feathers on the horizon

The eternal summer laughs at the wet grave

And if a loud cry resounds in the bedridden rocks

No one hears it no one

The desert always hollers under an impassive sky

The fixed eye hovers alone

Like the eagle at daybreak

Death swallows the dew

The snake smothers the rat

The nomad under his tent listens to the time screeching

On the gravel of insomnia

Everything is there waiting for a word already stated

Elsewhere

 

[From the collection Posthumes et divers (1991)]

 

Spontaneous Fires

 

The night the sky is an open sex

The fire dozes idle water dies

The body loses its forces well before midnight

Desiring to see itself dead it dies already

Time is but a funeral vault

For the one who gasps in superstition

The corpses remember death

Long after the forty days of use

Dust only stifles the already forgotten

The dead breathe

Their gaze perforated

Their mouth stretched by the electric play

Of the immense yawning

Of the final sneezing

By the suction and sobbing

By the hiccup and the last burp

If love is the son of the eye

Fire the son of wood

And wind the son of void

Even forests can hope for the brush fire

Is there a pain more in love with its prod

Than mine?

Vinegar revives old wounds

Insomnia sharpens the star's branches

A breath too abrupt and it evaporates

If God were a kite

Who the hell is George Sand

[From the collection Faire signe au machiniste (1970)]

 

There Are Intersections...

 

There are intersections where the night

The joy jumps on the back

Of the passerby

Such the lonely dawn in the acid wind

The decapitated dies standing up

Below

Body to body in the mud

Teeming furnace

The worms

Whips with triple straps

Caress the tip of the roots

Of flesh

Meat of sacrifice

Gem of the putrefaction

With no burden other than its arms

Tied elbow to elbow

Behind

Bundles of blood on the promised land

Prospectus of fertilizer

There are spittings in the very depths of the mirror

Scratches in the snow

Perjuries languish

In the eyes of our companions

Steam and sweats of the authoritarian woman

Naked on the floor Vibrating from hatred

"Move along" screams Evangeline

Too late

The well is dry the flies gone

In the jumble of greenery

A slight scent of underarm hesitates

Still

Petticoats from the bark of the phallus

Serve as extinguisher

Setting sun

There are living corpses in the mouth of infants

Weeping willows

Embryos coated with lying wax

In the aqueduct which flows

Over the plain

Tomorrow which will drink our fathers' blood

 

[From the collection Faire signe au machiniste (1977)]

 

Untitled Poem

 

Never tell your dream

To the one who doesn't love you

The hostile ear is dried up

The bitter mouth maligns

Hatred vomits the sand in the hourglass

Faster always faster

The betrayed night aborts

A passion in the present already passed

And fear only augments

The  rage of the caiman

The size of the cancer

Bury your dreams in the bags under your eyes

They will be safe from envy

They will be safe from the adage

That the African babbles

And all the old are wise

 

[From the collection Flammes immobiles (1985)] 

[Translated from the French by Gaelle Raphael]