Who knows the story

The century is almost over;
How did it start, when will it end,
against whom is this battle being waged?

Since it began: From the first chapter.  Before speech.

Those who stayed behind,
read the writing on the wall.

He who migrated, never found the promised land.

Speak, what will you say?
Or don't speak, and just listen.
Listen to any voice that may reach you.

Toss your old key into the ocean
as long as: no lock, neither a door, nor a house.
Visit our forsaken land sometimes.
The magic ring you covet is to be found there.

The woman you sought after, to no avail, 
for so long, awaits you there, now.

Open your hands.  Auction off your heart.  And hear the story.

The day is coming; countless are the signs.
The people ask for bread.  The tyrant sees a dream 
that defies interpretation.
The peddler of fatwas, purple-clothed
with the blood of sacrifice,
rips through the luxurious fabric of your dreams
with a dagger of righteousness
beating his little tabla all through the night
between your ears -- his ultimate joy:
that you never sleep.
The deadlier your migraines, the higher he soars.
It is a world clouded with mysteries.
Mysteries are embedded in words, but 
what they tell is only one part of the story.

The audience believed it.
The judge was suspicious of the details.
The scientist thought it was a dance:
between particles and monkeys and trees.
Between the seed, the ant, and Mars
and the galaxies whose giant arms
embrace a cloud of dust.

Don't speak; what will you say.
Or speak, and listen
                           to whoever comes along.

The Chinese poet
              dead more than a thousand
years ago, whispers in my ear;
              "From this high tower,
              I am startled to see
              how ferocious is the storm.
              The walled city looks empty
              when the leaves fall."
                                                      Li Dong

Maybe it's the wind, Master Li Dong,
reciting the story of the flood once more.

My tribe knows it well.
It knows its master and narrator.
It knows its heroes, those windmill shadows
Don Quixote fought valiantly
once upon a time:  today 
the coughing of a sick child
without medicine behind the walls
of siege, is enough to make it fall.

My tribe.  This page.  This pen.  This wall.
It is the sap, Master.  The sap rising
in the trunk of life and the tree.
No.  It is the sea of silence, and this
tiny boat has a story.

My friend who died yesterday in exile
battling his final pain,
knew the story from beginning to end
in a single moment of yearning.

Let the current take what it wants.
Let me remain in my place.
Give me this single moment, and let me be:
I want to hear the story.
 
 

Remarks to Sindbad from the Old Man of the Sea

Are you already tired?
Our quest has barely begun.
Forget the sea.
Stop dreaming of ships and trade
I'm the last voyage you will
ever make, and likewise
was the first.
Every way
you came by,
every road you took,

I paved with my own hands
for your sake.
and you still complain!
Too heavy on your shoulders, you say?
That's because
I carry eternity's weight
plus my own, and need your legs
to take me around
in my journeying
between night and day.
You will try to escape,
I know, time after time;
you will dream every night
that you crush my head
with a heavy stone
and dance drunkenly
over my corpse.
But if you happen to venture out
into those woods alone,
night will only deepen
around you, in every whisper
you shall hear 
a hissing snake, poison and trap
will be your lot everywhere.

Don't try to escape.
Forget the sea.
Stop dreaming of ships
and trade; today you have unbound the knot
of my waiting, and from now on
you will carry me on your
strong back, Sindbad,
to explore this island together,
you and I, I and thou,
as one.
 
 

The story will be told

On the highest deck --
in the lowest dump as well --
there's always a storyteller.
The story will be told.

Whose story: mine or yours?
Perhaps . . . his?  No matter from whose
                                   point of view, it will
be told: you, making up a story
full of gaps about me.
I, narrating your 
                                  tragi-comical tale?
Perhaps, he, the one ignorant
                       of all our days?

It will be told.

Even the language of metaphor
hoarded like pulp in a giant sponge,
even the secrets of the tribe
hidden in the moth-eaten saddlebags
of time, shall find a haven in words
with a slip from the storyteller's 
tongue, a mere stroke of the pen.

So are the tales spun from nothing
for a world that is nothing in the end
but a tale paring its fingernails
like James Joyce's god,
waiting to be told.

And though
                    it loses its shine
                                            with the passage of days,
yet like a record
                    without a needle, it will recite
what details there are: those worthy
                    of being recited
to whoever has a pair of ears.
 
 

Tea with Mouayed al-Rawi in a Turkish café in Berlin after the Wall came down

Our cigarette packs
close to hand (that secret fuel) . . .
The babble of immigrants
slapping dominoes on marbletops:
a noise familiar once,
                               out of which 
a word may flare up amid the smoke --
born there, refusing
to die here.
If we don't say it, who will?
And who are we
                               if we don't?

Not about what came
to pass;  how it came, and passed!
But about this spoon buried
in sugar, and this finjan.
Not that Wall whose remains 
are sold as souvenirs
at check-point Charlie where
only yesterday
they exchanged spies
and traded secrets of the East
and West, but this
wall painting facing us now,
with a harem from the days
of the Sublime Porte
who recline dreamily
in pleasure boats, on a river
guzzled down, in one
gulp, by history.

Let's say we have seen 
a lot of walls, how they rise
and fall, how the dust
particles dance under the hooves
of the Mongol's horse,
how "victory" laughs
its idiot's laugh in the mirror
of loss, before it breaks
and its shards fill the world
where we walk, and meet,
every time.