Your Mystery is the Milky Way

Transition, by Amena Bandukwala. Image courtesy of the artist

after Mahmoud Darwish

: These planets remain nameless.
: Just open the skies to Gilead.
: Where we will keep meeting?
: Where we will keep believing.
: What is death like?
: Like midnight with many moons.
: Not like the shrill sound of another century?
: Like a house emptied of home.
: Where does war live in the body?
: Where is the heart without memory?
: What is longing on this line?
: What is this line without longing?
: Who wants most when the wave is weary?
: Who’s marred most when the map is missing?
: Don’t maps lie?
: Like a country with two names.
: The hours are fiction.
: We need inventions.
: We need wanders more.
: You mean wonders.
: I mean the sea is lonely.
: That happens when water is warfare.
: That happens when love is lament.
: Borders will be broken cords.
: Will we dream the same dream in another life?
: Probably.
: Will we desire the same person at a different time?
: Probably not.
: Who belongs together?
: Who undresses their wounds?
: Those with a roof.
: Those without.
: Those with a compass.
: Those without.
: Those with an oud.
: Those without.
: Those who dance.
: Even if grief wears a dangling ankle bracelet.
: Even if we can’t gather all the natives.
: But we’ll always be able to gather their hearts.
: Maybe when I finish this line, you will reappear
and the metaphor you left me in a verse, will liberate me
from what is about to happen.

~ Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world, educated in the United States and United Kingdom, and has moved between cities in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the United States most of her life. Her recent books include the flash collection ‘The Republics’, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed ‘Poet in Andalucía’; and ‘Love and Strange Horses’, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.