Poems from Violation
By Mahmoud Abu Hashhash
Translated by Wiam El-Tamami
My friends, faraway and safe
in their houses and streets
their offices and parks
write to me asking:
Are you still alive?
They don’t reply
when they receive
my cryptic response
*
The night is pregnant with bombing. This evening
I bought a beach chair and table, second hand.
I thought: they’d be good on the balcony.
And for transporting the wounded,
if need be.
It’s been months since I sat on the balcony, years
since I saw the sea—we lost it in the war.
The settlement on the neighbouring mountain
makes daggers of the balcony glass. But tonight
I am taken, by desire and the moon,
to stretch out my body as I used to,
resume my own life
as though the chair
is just an excuse
*
Your body, Nicole, is the safest place
in the city. I watched you ease
your camera into the cannon’s mouth:
image of a deep spiral darkness.
You roam around your house at night.
A graveyard ten feet away, the possibility
of a grenade. You raise the sound recorder
high above your head to intercept
the wheeze of bullets.
And when I come to you, I slip through
your door. I close your windows, one by
one, and draw your blinds, before
taking shelter in your body.
And I wonder:
How can you bear it?
*
Roses that bloom behind glass, and fall.
My beard that grows like heavy grass. The wooden
wall clock: I broke its hands when the soldiers
entered the city.
Only the indoor plant dances,
alone in the corner.
The distance between two walls
is the path of my pacing steps.
My chaos expands by the bed:
last Thursday’s paper; that photo of us
discussing a poem at the café
yellowing with age.
Do the dead stare at me from the television screen
or do they peer in through the window?
The radio is not picking up any signals
from the city: nothing but scratches, still.
Ali fidgets in your womb. We hover around
the swell of the belly and whisper:
don’t come out yet
wait until the soldiers
are done with their mission
until the tank clears out
of the way to milk
*
He wore a beard, and a dirty coat. By the sides
of the road he came and went with downcast eyes.
Rubbish is the only thing that stopped him. He never
held out a hand for bread. He was never seen sleeping.
He mocked those who mocked him as they passed,
laughing like one who held in his hands keys
to their secrets. He produced only shadows.
Thursday’s grave visitors traded his news.
They said: he was urinating on the gravestones.
They said: he penetrated a woman who was buried last night.
They killed him with seven guns. They emptied them into him,
then melted safely back into their dark.
And in the night, each saw a vision of him.
One said: His blood, how it flowed, white as milk
in the pitch black!
Another: Seven dogs gnashed at his corpse.
A third: I saw all the women crying over him, and each
one wailed: “My son!”
A fourth: With every bullet that entered his heart,
he laughed at us.
A fifth: I wish we hadn’t killed him.
A sixth: Let’s pray for his soul.
A seventh: Let’s build a tomb for him, and make it our shrine.
*
I thought my house was here.
This house looks just like my house.
I stopped because my footsteps
signalled my arrival. Everything
about it looks like my house:
the door, too, looks just like
my door. Only the colour
confuses me. Every morning
it releases me and to it I return,
as though here my journey ends.
Only the colour…
I walk on, away. A touch of paint
would make me walk through that door.
A touch of paint would make my bedroom
right there: my books half-read by the pillow,
a bottle of water, my ashtrays overflowing.
From its windows I once saw
a blood-streaked moon hurled by the sky.
It didn’t scare the lovers: it cast off
its shadows, emerged into the light:
silver, kisses, prayers, and sin.
A touch of paint would make five green jugs
await some water from me now.
A touch of paint would convince me
that the things of a woman who left
until war lays down its loads
and has not come back
…………………………………yet
are there in a locked room.
A touch of paint would make this key
that’s in my hand
open that door
*
A space, green, that you did not leave
………….and I did not enter.
Between us a bridge of coloured fog
………….and we did not meet.
I knew you were there, feeling me,
………….I feeling you. We did not part.
Nothing pulled us forward or back.
………….It was not balance that pulled us.
You were mist, I the colour of mist.
Nothing on me spelled me,
………….nothing on you spelled you.
We were water meeting water.
*
I will go to the river.
I will go to the river after you.
Don’t be afraid. I will go just
to the river.
Wander down the path alongside
Stare into the sheet of water
………….from afar
Maybe sit where your image
quenched the water’s thirst
Maybe go farther
in search of last night
But I will not give the river
the mud of my desire
of my life
Maybe I will scoop a drink
from the spot where, yesterday,
your eyes were fixed
But I will not go into the river
………….any deeper
Maybe search the bottom
for your high soaring star
But I will not cross the bridge
from my bank
to the other side
Don’t be afraid.
I will go just
to the river.
*
With night walks,
with friends, with family, with trees
the moon, downcast eyes, sun and shadows,
yesterday’s reading, the heroism of things, creatures
of the dark, chasing butterflies, old books, past loves,
playing songs with children, talking about birds, memories
of the hunt, with cinema and politics, small victories,
defeats, dusting rugs, lighting candles, incense,
wine and waking, with sleep, counting stars,
mocking the stars, reading coffee cups,
astrology, with curses, with laughter,
anger, fiddling with the furniture,
with philosophy, with caring
and not caring
With the idea of wayfaring,
taming my hair, clipping my nails, with clouds
and the wind, with every inch
of doing and not doing
I am trying to withstand
the gales of your absence
Mahmoud Abu Hashhash is a poet and writer who lives in Ramallah. He is the author of two poetry collections — The Pain of Glass and Violation — and a novel entitled Ink, which has been published in France as Ramallah, Mon Amour. He studied English Literature at Birzeit University and earned a Master’s Degree in art criticism and art management from City University of London. Mahmoud writes essays on art and visual culture in Palestine, and has edited and co-edited a number of art catalogs and books about young Palestinian artists.
Wiam El-Tamami (wiameltamami.com) is an Egyptian writer, translator, editor, and wanderer. Her writing and translation work has been featured in publications such as Granta, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, AGNI, CRAFT, ArabLit, and Jadaliyya, and is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review and The Common. It has also been published in several anthologies. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize. Her work has also received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin.
These selections first appeared in Banipal magazine.