Twigs Yearning for the Wind
1
I wish I were a tree
Stays home
when lovers
depart
Whenever names carve
my chest
I say: no problem;
lovers can wound
I wish I were a tree
who doesn’t write poems
yet bury itself in the earth
to be
I wish I were a tree
my home tight
yet my pride
whenever a heart flutters for me
I grant him a home among the twigs
I wish I were a tree
to prove that the light seeping
from the leaves
of my chest, is not light
but organs of sight
2
The Oaktree
feeding on Grandmother’s chest in the grave
became so much like her
3
What are trees but roads standing on one leg?
4
This is not a sapling grown on its own
under the window
neither it is a rooster’s crown
It is the head of a giant tree
planted by some poet
upside down
in the other side of the globe
5
Age is a calculated curse
we age by the second
to chew the disaster,
we invented the year
Meaning is delayed
we walk a meter per second
on a two meter per second
road.
Translated from the Arabic by Fatima J. Alharthi; published in Sard Adabi, issue 7 (2022).
Mahdi Mansour is a Lebanese poet, physicist and educator based in Paris. He writes Arabic poetry across classical, free-verse and prose forms, and sees poetry and physics as two languages for the same question: how we understand the world and put our wonder at it into words.
He has published eight poetry collections, and his poems have been sung by Faia Younan, Ahmad Houeili and others; «Ya Qatily» won the Prince Abdullah Al-Faisal International Prize for Arabic Poetry (2024). He has read at the Festival d'Avignon, Étonnants Voyageurs in Saint-Malo, the Babylon International Festival and the Jerash Festival, and his TED talk in Arabic explores why physics and poetry are so alike.