Mustafa Abdulmalek Al-Sumaidi: “The Sweetest of the Poems”

Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού

In a deliberate journey,

I took my way to her through fourfold seasons,

hoping I might find her awaiting me:

The sweetest of the poems.

I traversed Spring,

lingering long in outset contemplations,

though it revealed not to me

even a bud of its opening verse.

I attempted again,

touching it more than I should,

but its hand bore not her fragrance,

despite the diversity of flowers.

“Perhaps in the thunder’s roar, she will burst,

Or within showers of hail she takes shape,”

I said it, as Summer stretched vast before me

pouring down without her sent-down grace.

She was not there,

even in a droplet beaded on a leaf

caressed by a slight breeze

before it fades to nothing.

“Maybe from a stark, lifeless void,

she will emerge in a season yet to be,”

I beguiled myself with such wishful thinking,

oblivious to how Winter speaks to me of itself:

in the nakedness of trees,

in the pallid face of the earth

in the hue-lacking, wasteland.

I pursued the last of all seasons,

sifting through withered leaves

beneath the shadow of dusk,

I whispered to me:

“I shall not bring my journey to an end

until I reach its opening verse.”

Then, after awhile, I turned my sight skyward,

meditating upon Almighty’s vast dominion

amid a long night of sleepless stars,

and thus she descended

in full-harmonious symmetry:

The sweetest of the poems.

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