Psalm

I amuse myself with my country.
     I glimpse its future approaching on the eyelashes of an ostrich, I toy with its history and its days, I strike it with stones and thunderbolts. I extinguish its lamps and light its windows, and at the other end of day I inaugurate its history.

I am a stranger to all of you. I am from the other end. I live in a country of my own, inflating the sky to see its ashes, and in sleeping and waking I open a bud to live within.

Something must be born, so I bore caverns in my skin for lightning and build nests. I must pass like thunder into lips as sad as straw, between stone and autumn, between pore and epidermis, between thigh and thigh.
      And so I sing: “Form worthy of our demise—advance.”
     And so I shout and sing: “Who will give us the maternity of the cosmos, who will nourish us with mines?”

I advance toward my self, toward ruins. The silence of calamity takes me—I’m too short to gird the earth like a rope, I’m not sharp enough to pierce the face of history and plunge in.

You want me to be like you. You boil me in the cauldron of your prayers; you mix me with the broth of armies and the pepper of tyrants, then pitch me like a tent for the wali and hoist my skull like a flag.
     (My death,
     Nevertheless I run toward you, I rush rush rush to you.)

You live like flagstones, and lamentation is your air. You announce the hedgehog’s abode and sleep on the scarab’s censers—your children are immolations.

A distance as great as a mirage divides us.

I rouse hyenas in you, I rouse the gods. I sow sedition in you and suckle fever, then teach you to journey without a guide. I am a pole for your latitudes and a walking springtime. I am a convulsion in your throats, a hemorrhage in your words.


You advance like leprosy toward me, and I am the one bound to your dirt. Yet nothing unites us, everything divides us—so let me burn alone, let me pass through you like a spear of light.
     I cannot live with you, I cannot live without you. You are an undulation in my senses, and I cannot escape you. Even so, cry out, “The sea, the sea!” Even so, hang the beads of the sun on your thresholds.

Open my memory and study my face beneath its words, learn my alphabet. When you see foam weaving my flesh and stone flowing in my blood, you will see me.
      I am closed like a tree trunk, present and ungraspable like air. Thus I cannot surrender to you.

I was born in the sockets of lilacs, I grew in the orbits of lightning, I live with light and grass. I storm and I clear up, I shine and cloud over, I rain and snow—the hours are my language, and my country is day.

The people are sleeping, but if they die they’ll awaken, or so it was said. You are all sleeping, but if you awaken you’ll die, or so it shall be said.
     You are dirt on my windowpanes, and I must remove you. I am the coming morning and the map that draws itself.

Nevertheless, there’s a fever in my bowels that keeps vigil over you.
     Nevertheless, I await you,
     In the shell of night by the sea, in the roaring of the depths, in the holes in the robe of the sky, in the jujubes and acacias, in the pines and cedars, in the hearts of the waves, in the salt,
      I await you.