Some of Nazik al Malaika's poems - Fragments (2) :
1-
The wind asks who am I?
I am its confused spirit, whom time has disowned
I, like it, never resting
continue to travel without end
continue to pass without pause
should we reach a bend
We would think it end of our suffering
and then - void
Time asks who am I?
I, like it, am a giant, embracing centuries
I return and grant them resurrection
I create the distant past
From the charm of pleasant hope
And I return to bury it
to fashion for myself a new yesterday
whose tomorrow is ice.
2- From - the guest that didn't come:
The evening passed and the moon's brow was on the wane,
We were about to say farewell to another evening
And witness how happiness was moving towards the abyss
You did not come and were lost with the other hopes
You left your vacant seat
To hold our fading gathering in anxious expectation
Glimmering about a visitor who did not come.
I did not know that in your absence beyond the years
You leave your shadows behind in every word and every meaning
In every angle of my vision and every curve.
I did not know that even in your absence,
You overshadow those present.
That hundreds of visitors
Are lost in a moment of yearning
Which ebbs and flows, longing for a visitor
Who did not come.
3- The end of the stairs:
The days have passed, bedimmed.
When we met not, even in the shimmer of a mirage.
And when I, alone, feed on the sound of
footsteps in the dark
Behind the cruel window-pane, behind the door.
I stand alone...
And days have passed,
Cold, creeping and dragging along me dubious boredom.
While I harked, counting their anxious minutes beat.
Has time gone by? Or have we lived a timeless time?
Sunk in the tides of dreams
And days have passed,
Laden with my longing, Where am I?
Still staring at the stairs
And stairs do start, but where do they lead?
They start in my heart where a dark maze reigns.
They start. Where lies the door to them?
The door to the stairs?
4- Days have passed, whose light has been snuffed,
When we did not meet, not even in imagination,
While all alone I have been here feeding
on the footsteps of the dark
outside the cruel window pane, outside the door.
Days have passed while all alone I have been here,
Cold days creeping, dragging along my
suspecting impatience,
And I have listened and counted the anxious minutes.
Was it time that has passed ot have we been
Wading through timelessness?
Days have passed, made heavy with my longings,
And I? I am still gazing at the stairs,
The stairs that here, but I know not
Where they end?
They begin here in my heart where it is all dark,
But where is the door, the shadowy door
At the bottom of the stairs?
5- From: "Five songs for pain."
We crowned you as a god at dawn
And prostrated our brows at your silver alter
O, our love, O Pain
We burnt you incense of linseed and sesame
Then offered sacrifices and sang verses
Of Babylonian tune.
We built you a temple of fragrant walls
Sprinkled its floor with oil and pure wine
And burning tears.
We kindled for you fires of palm branches,
Of our sorrow and of wheat bran in the long night,
Our lips closed.
6- Ice and Fire
If  you may reproach me,
Would I withdraw?
Would the sharp Icicle of your plague
Cut through my flames?
Would I yield, and not go mad?
No. I should revolt,
I scream inside.
But, were I to trespass
Darken the air with some bitter phrase
perhaps a misplaced word
You would be offended
turn dry like sand
Rise and quietly disappear.
Don't ask me why I am gagged.
Here, I remain
a bed of roses bent under your snow;
a puzzle of unanswerable questions
in some corner of your heart.
It is destiny's prescription:
Adam is the ice, Eve the fire.
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