[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]