Ali Al-Shalah (1965) is a poet from Babylon, Iraq. He holds an MA from Yarmouk University (1995) and a PhD from the University of Bern (2007). He has published numerous poetry collections and critical studies, and his work has been translated into several languages. He has also founded and directed cultural institutions in Iraq, Jordan, Switzerland, and most recently Egypt.

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A Life Less... A Life More

My departed friends...

Why do you persist in waking me each night?

I am the eternal palm that does not die...

Spinning through a new age, bearing fruits of seductive words,

I trample the counterfeit wheat of praise with a noble shoe,

I name the land as land and walk,

Because the land returns to me, I shall walk,

I embrace those who once walked upon it, writing them in the sands,

My homeland is the hallucination of fragrance in a weary half-bottle,

Diffusing with the water of tales,

And laying out the enchantresses,

My homeland is Scheherazade singing seductions to you so you may return to her... 

The Calendar, Bare

When you remove this year from the calendar,

Days cascade like a waterfall spreading its wings over a dark valley,

Events collide in hurried hues,

Sorrow gathers the crumbs of shy joy

And sings to nothingness.

Children suspicious of a red Santa,

In black clothes and black gifts—

Is this the taste of the coming year?

Or the shape of the past year?

Or a series of years?

The valley recedes and days revolve,

And the bird flaps its wings into it and sinks,

So when will the meaning of things

Cease from things and leave them senseless?

Meaning is the problem of expression, and the world is harsh. 

I Am Neither a Storyteller Nor Shahryar

The Scheherazades distribute me

among mirrors

While I am lean in my vast self

Watching the bird stoning me with the unseen

And seeing myself as a man

from women’s tales,

Your key is an old lock sleeping in my soul

And I try it in the eyes of mirage

I am not what I desire

So why did you stop me and say

you surprised me?

I am hidden in the scandal of intentions,

I believe in the women’s core between

your eyes,

And your perfume is a caravan from the south of modesty,

Why does my heart now shrink with you,

And who but me chooses you, scented with what the palm exhales,

And dreams of those who brought down the clay from the navel of the earth,

Your winds rain me with those adorned by the cloak and tears,

I am half of what the seers claim, and you are the half of insight,

Therefore, I fear the chants of your soul,

Because the distance in life flees,

And so I will occupy my soul with what remains,

And your perfume is clay shaping me with life. 

Departure

This is a kiss in the wind

Do not blame the lips of speech,

My body is the letters of yellowed pages

And you are the seduction of stones...

There’s no point in wandering if you reach the waters drenched in fear,

Patch your song once with the scent of an

unattainable woman,

And take the agate of time as her Andalusia,

And try to wander in the valley of the sun,

And commit modesty upon life.

The singer is weary, and singing is another

kind of tablet,

Polished by a messenger who has not come. 

The Wilderness Signals to Me

I have no sand to open the desert,

Wandering chatters within me and releases me from the sins of time,

People are places fading into others,

And I describe the void with new illusions,

What came in the tablets may come,

And I have recited water for the thirsty,

What came in the tablets may come,

So leave the saying to another memory,

And try to come from question to question.

The jar was empty and anchored near me.

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This Death Is Tasteless

A body crouching in the possibility of life

And the fruit of death watches it from all

directions,

The memory of water draws the tattoo of its trees in the seasons,

And the memory of fire lays out the times,

This death is tasteless; we consume it every moment,

And fear brings it to us everywhere,

A body shorter than the tales of its ancestors,

And questions without slopes to feel

their pains,

And dates are not stories of those who claimed, even if they claimed,

We read what we desire,

And we accept whom we desire,

And we part from those others desire,

And we believe at that moment that what we desire is different from whom we desire,

Assuming solutions, we gather our souls in a lust for annihilation,

And we attempt a death with the taste of those who departed with the dates,

And we chant in the names,

This descending death upon souls recently lacks the taste of death. 

My Father or Me

I was finally born...

While others returned early to their illusions,

Because I am a disciple in the presence of his desert sheikh,

I pray upon its wandering and send it peace.

I see what the stranger sees of orphanhood in the stingy roads,

I see what the fog sees of the sun on the balconies of presence,

I see what the disciples saw after

the last supper,

And I narrate texts about rain, the unseen,

and doubt,

I believed the prophecy of those tired of return,

I am the extension of my father in the mirage,

And his fear of his end in the lands that were his killers,

I am his shadow in supplication and his tablets in the prayer of absence,

His voice scatters me in mirrors,

And draws me in the fracture of men,

My father after fifty years,

My father before fifty years,

I encounter myself in your wills, I cry for our repetition,

And I embrace the charms and remains.

When I seek you,

A witness in the air watches me,

Points to me and gestures to you,

So who will be the purpose?

And who will hit the mark?

The day you dragged me to life as a child,

And buried me with prayer,

I sought your traces in the first utterance,

So you were the first to be hoped for and repeated,

My father after fifty years, I see you

in my person,

I am the one who intended to be another than you for fifty-one years,

I see what you saw and walk towards me,

Without goal or question,

My father after fifty years... I am.

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