Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
Short biography: Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad is an author from Syria. I live in Germany. He writes poetry, stories, and social blogs. I have published a number of my poems in international literary magazines and websites. His poems have also been translated into many international languages, including German, English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Croatian, Greek, Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese and Armenian.
He also won the Ossi di Seppia International Poetry Award in Italy as the best foreign author in the poetry category.
Away from the microscope
Away from the scourge of censorship
Explain to us how an iron will dissolves in the face of hammer blows
And how the sun protects itself from heart attacks
And how gardenias bloom on walls that breathe crushed concrete
Away from the guardians of virtue
Steer clear of the words that sever umbilical cords
Rouse them from their slumber with mosquito spray or something harsher
Knead them with the music that frees roads from their darkness
Let them expel all the sighs suppressed within them
Load them with the freedom that shakes the firmness of iron fists
And train them
To box with sandbags
To crush Siberian ice
To strain their vocal chords
To pull tight the belt round the waist of the wind
Steer clear of the words that smell the corpse of nothingness
Words that don’t rely on support from any god
And let them build and destroy the world you will not see
The consequences will not be as great as you imagine
There is no longer a marked difference between right and wrong.
The Diary page 4
He passed through here
Surrounded by masked guards
Walking the way of meetings that begin with fights
He passed by a royal procession
Trills of joy and firecrackers
And vehicles defeating geography
He came to restore order to the chaos
To put an end to the politics of impunity
But he didn’t
He came to explain to us
What the skulls of mountains look like
Which somehow no longer exist
And how things bow their heads when they have been beheaded
He passed through here
A dictator who does not allow debate
Who cooks clouds in an air fryer
And despises poets for moral reasons
He admitted nothing to us
All that was said mere rumors
He didn’t preach salvation to us
And didn’t take our existence seriously
We offered him allegiance and bouquets of flowers
And the response was a look of derision
He was the god’s representative
The second man in the sky
And he had all the solutions
A philosopher and yet
We saw him as a philosopher
And he was
Always
He was an ambassador for lofty aims
A sturdy branch prepared for all eventualities
He depended on instinct to explain things
And we understood after much effort
The world is only three meters wide
And nature is its own enemy
Freedom is an earthquake measuring a thousand on the Richter scale
And certainty is rooted in nothingness
And the end happens every day
Every day there is an ending
We saw him as a philosopher
A branch crowded with question marks
And a speaker of sign language
Focus of rumors and hopes
Music was his flimsy crutch
And sometimes he embraced dogs that expressed their concerns
Leg embracing leg
He knew
The mentality of the fire we sit around
And the days when tanks turn their heads towards nothingness
And the nights when the god opens the doors of complaint
He walked on the maps that leapt from the trembling of the gentle waves
And his eyes ploughed the distant horizons in search
Of the solution
Of the wind
That would sever the roots that bind us to the depths
BY: Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad
TRANSLATED BY: Catherine Cobham
