This is a poem Nizar Qabbani wrote after many years of exile, while returning to Damascus (also known as Sham): In Sham the geography of my body changes The cells of my blood become green In Sham a new voice emerges from my voice And my fingers become a tribe I return to Damascus Riding on the backs of clouds Riding the two most beautiful horses in the world The horse of passion And the horse of poetry I return after sixty years To search for my umbilical cord For the Damascene barber who circumcised me I return to the womb in which I was formed To the first woman who taught me The geography of love And the geography of women I return After my limbs have been strewn across all the continents And my cough has been scattered in all the hotels After my mother’s sheets scented with laurel soap I have found no other bed to sleep on I enter the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque And greet everyone in it Corner to corner Tile to tile Dove to dove I wander in the gardens of Kufi script And pluck beautiful flowers of God’s words And hear with my eye the voice of the mosaics And the music of agate prayer beads A state of revelation and rapture overtakes me So I climb the steps of the first minaret that encounters me Calling: “Come to the jasmine” “Come to the jasmine” Returning to you Stained by the rains of my longing Returning to fill my pockets With nuts, green plums, and green almonds Returning to my oyster shell Returning to my birth bed For the fountains of Versailles Are no compensation for the Fountain Café And Les Halles in Paris Is no compensation for the Friday market And Buckingham Palace in London Is no compensation for Azem Palace And the pigeons of San Marco in Venice Are no more blessed than the doves in the Umayyad Mosque And Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides Is no more glorious than the tomb of Salah al-Din Al-Ayyubi I immerse myself in the Buzurriya Souq Set a sail in a cloud of spices Clouds of cloves And cinnamon And camomile I perform ablutions in rose water once And in the water of passion many times And I forget, while in the Souq al-‘Attarine, All the concoctions of Nina Ricci And Coco Chanel What are you doing to me Damascus? How have you changed my culture? My aesthetic taste? I open the drawers of memory One then another I remember the Damascene houses With their ceilings decorated with glazed tiles And their interior courtyards That remind you of descriptions of heaven The Damascene House Is beyond the architectural text The design of our homes Is based on an emotional foundation For every house leans on the hip of another And every balcony Extends its hand to another facing it Damascene houses are loving houses They greet one another in the morning And exchange visits Secretly—at night.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Jun 2013 22:33:09 +0000
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