Man of Glass
By Kamal Abu Al-Nour
Translated by Abdou Elrayess with Yasser Abdellatif
Once
I took my heart for a walk
And told him:
I am a dead man
So, what tempts you in a lifeless body?
**
I open the door so that the day gets in,
leaving a slap on my face.
I close the door so that the night knocks,
leaving a woman’s body and says:
This is how life is.
Remember that you turned your back to those lakes
That no human has walked
So, live in peace,
And keep your eyes on your fingertips
And do not try to put your foot
In the water.
**
Every man has a cloud:
And when he puts his hands on its chest,
It rains.
Then the man sows its land
Which bears fruit immediately.
I have been laying hands for years,
Yet there was neither rain nor fruit—
Only a thief waiting for a stray cloud
**
I need to sleep outdoors,
To look for another sky.
My body is no longer obedient
And that fire doesn’t scare me anymore.
I have just learned
Why happiness passes before me in a flash,
I have just learned
That life gets frittered away in the space between
Cognition and obsession
**
Life told me:
If you want to touch this cloud
Carry me on your back
And climb this mountain!
So, I went up
But my legs got stiff, and my back grew hunched.
Then life gloated as it looked into my eyes
And said: stretch out your hands!
When I, with bowed head and broken eyes,
Looked down at my feet,
I found neither mountain nor cloud
But a dog trembling,
And a cat mewling under my bed.
**
A woman ties me to her tree.
Then God stretches out His hands
And gives me an axe, saying:
Cut down this tree!
But I bind myself tightly to the tree,
And apologize to it.
**
Each time the wind blew, I closed my eyes:
It passed and I closed my eyes.
And each time,
A layer of my heart was scraped away
Until I checked my heart once
And didn’t find it.
It is inevitable that my eyelids will be torn off
So, my eyes, stay open forever.
**
Leave the bouquet in its place,
Leave the book where it is,
Don’t change the music;
My heart only sways to God’s rhythm.
Do not tamper with the sky clock.
I need a cook who is good at kneading happiness—
I am not always a demon or an angel
**
When I was about to pluck your breaths
The distance between us was enough
To break my heart
I neither plucked them nor healed my heart.
There is a rabid dog
That drives its fangs into my soul
So here I am,
A ghost searching for a ghost.
The distance between us has become vast.
There is nothing in this wasteland
But barking
**
One evening
I checked my organs;
They have become strange to me.
Before, they were intact,
Each one with its language and music,
But now they are abandoned and lazy.
I thought they were obsolete
But when a breeze passed by,
A breeze I had never yet known,
They returned to their former state.
It seems that they needed to perish
To rise again from the ashes.
**
Don’t touch this sudden love
This hot water
This luscious body.
You are an outcast:
All bodies you crave
Turn into glass.
**
I am a cowardly man
The walls I always hide beside,
Curled up in, convulse.
The house is full of ghosts,
The door is wide open,
Yet I don’t step outside
**
At some point
We must become killers;
These mistakes we made once
Without guilt
Are enough for us
To have the fangs necessary to smile
While we see the bleeding of
The people who shackled our legs.
We wanted nothing but to breathe
We hoped life would shake our hands kindly,
Would embrace us warmly, as we did,
But it doesn’t know that the wounded sheep
Set their traps
To heal their wounds with wolf meat
**
O death!
You old rascal, please don’t show up on time.
I have a girlfriend I haven’t met yet,
A child whose lungs are not fully developed.
I have happiness for whom I open my arms
But it runs away.
I promise, after the first knock,
I will smash the windows and doors,
And throw her down without a word
And scream without ceasing
Until I get my share of life.
Kamal Abu Al-Nour is one of the poets of the 90s generation in Egypt. His poems were published in magazines such as Ibdaa, Adab, Naqd, Elsher, and Doha, as well as many Egyptian newspapers such as Al-Gomhuria and Al-Massaa. He disappeared from the literary scene in Egypt for more than twenty years. He reappeared in 2017 when his first collection was published under the title Waves of Phobia by the General Egyptian Book Organization and two more poetry collections by him followed, the first Final Jump for a Dead Fish by Dar Al-Ain in 2018 and the second is A Tree in The Heart of a Wolf by the General Egyptian Book Organization in 2022. His fourth collection is in print.
Abdou Elrayess is a translator, researcher, and poet who is a core lecturer for the Culture Palaces and was shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, translation branch, in 2015. He has translated a number of books from English to Arabic, including Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Richard G. Klein’s The Dawn of Human Culture.
Yasser Abdellatif is an award-winning Egyptian poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and novelist. In 2005, he was awarded the Sawiris Prize for his debut novel Qanoon al-Wiratha (The Law of Inheritance), which is available from Seagull Books in Robin Moger’s translation.