Zainab Ghassan Al-Bayati (Prepared Angela Kosta)
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Poem by Zainab Ghassan Al-Bayati
THE STEP OF ABSENCE.
In the warmth of the gathering,
The scent of a hand
Secretly wrapped the rose,
Crept like shy touch
To a flash.
Shivering on the waist of the night.
The cloak shivered on the shoulder of the breeze,
And time awakened from sleep,
A terror almost fell in love with the echo,
Spinning out of its heartbeats
Wings for passersby.
The night swept me away from my secret,
Embracing me in its hug damp with moans,
And drags me in
Where the voices forgotten are.
It hid me in the bashfulness of a woman
Scared of weakness
As a branch of the forest scared of the breaking of the rain.
A woman.
shudders at her name,
Oh letters!
Barbed arrows of absence.
Pierced with yearning my cheek
With lightning flash, trust.
The laughter of youth
Shattered the silence of my book,
To burst; To record
With perfumed inspiration.
Sleeping in the eyelid of old coffee
Waiting for lips that never come.
The palm tree drew its bashfulness
On absence's page,
Stretching shadows out
It had letters of apology written
To Damascus.
And each summer shepherd of mine,
His voice runs with honey. and ash:
"I resemble you,
Like a land deprived bare of its wounds,
My mobile phone, from off a pillow of verse
and from off a letter.
trembles when fear sparkles,
When women's pride is teased out
On waiting's margin,
And absence strikes the cheek
Of alienation's onion,
When the meeting forgets its step,
And when the eyes are
A poem hung
Between two stars.
Prepared Angela Kosta
