I know you, shared life Unexpected earth
I recognize you as if I had made you
At the extreme extent of my recognition
I know you because none of your disgust
Blurs my heart with my head and its thirst
Because your baseness remains at the surface
Without even grazing the depth of your chasms
I know you I’ve looked you in the eye
Far too seriously and for far too long
Not to remember even your rottenness
Old persisted earth Earth you stranger
Strangers I followed for their glowing faces
Chased all the way to impossible borders
Where the earth melts in the sun’s pieces
Violent strangers who showed me the flight
Of those ruby birds from the purple Nile
One day that my eyes were sliding inside me
You who have taught me more than what you know
And the weary desire to give what I have
Named everything I will never possess
As a farewell I will follow you
With my most tender eyes Strangers
Clearers of the sky Impossible strangers
As for me simple catcher of quotidian birds
I sink into a learned planet
Straight into the light like a good fruit
The taste of which traces my routes
And I want to apply all my weight on the earth
Weighing enough to be left there to die
Menaâ
Even in the winter, days were mild orchards
When the Guerza pass was sealed with snow
Grenades were just fruits then—only
Their leathery skin bled from the savoring.
We hid in the frizzy maquis only
To laugh—Guns merely searched game
And if the granitic mountain blew
Up with dynamite, it was the teacher
My father digging a path for his Citroën
None of the houses needed doors
Since faces opened in faces
And scattered neighbors simply neighbored
Night didn’t exist since we slept within it
It was in the Aurès
In Menaâ
Mixed municipality, Arris
As they say in the press
Were born there
In Menaâ—Mixed municipality, Arris
And past twenty, my passions
Are the fruit of their predilections
Back when birds fallen from nests
Also fell from Nedjaï’s hands
Into the well of my Shawia eyes.
Chilly like an iris
My friend Nedjaï
Naked underneath his blue gandoura
Ran through dusk in gradients
Gliding on grey scorpions
Of Oued El Abdi
Behind those gleaming jackals
That laugh with open necks.
And upright, at an acute angle—slick
Upon his stilts—he used to throw
The moon with his slingshot
To see all the way
To the end of space
Now, it’s also the war in my douar
Which has withdrawn its miles of bliss
Like the grey-topped wings of a polymorphic
Butterfly. It broods beneath its zinc shanties
On all the seedling joys that vanished
Outside, like the orchards whose sweet
Silkiness made the wind more honeyed than a bee
Like the sound of Nedjaï’s bare feet
On the roots of my childhood buried
Under sediments of hatred, fear and blood
Because it is blood that pulses in Oued El Abdi
And rolls scorpions swollen like wounds
outliving their own harassed bodies
It’s the war
The sky frothing with helicopters
Blows up with dynamite
The warm earth springs and glides
In honey slides
Along shards of blue glazed tiles
From the white sky
Propeller sounds
Have replaced the sound of bees
Under the touch
Of clandestine radio transmitters
The breath of freedom
Propagating through electric waves
Vibrates like the stormy fur of a feral feline
Buzzed by bursts of oxygen
And finds its way to every chest
Sounds disappear
In the warm air and in Time
It’s a muted war
Behind the doors of Batna
I witness on the screen of my childhood
A silent fight
In slow motion
Everything that moves me in this world, soul-deep,
Comes from a mountain range in pink and white on maps
Of geography books from fourth and fifth grade
And resembles it by some liquid joy
Where all my childhood may have run
Everything I love and all I do today
Has roots there
Beyond the Guerza pass in Menaâ
Where my first friend, I know, will await me
Since he grew up in the flesh of my heart—If
The world around me has aged by twenty years
It retains in its skin my Shawia loves.
With Rage In My Heart
I can no longer love but with rage in my heart
It’s my way of having a heart of plenty
It’s my way of pushing back the pain
It’s my way of setting ashes ablaze
Through sheer heart crushes and rage
The only loyal way that clears for me
A thoughtful route at the edge of wreckage
With its weight in gold, in joy, in distress
These lips of your mouth my double richness
Flat out, skin-thin, ready to seize
My science unfolds like a wise rigging
Where steel burns the jellyfish
I secretly dragged in the open sea
Where the razor-sharp sky slices the earth
Where naked men no longer need excuses
To laugh unfurled under tormenting skies
They told me words that can bury in shame
But I won’t keep quiet, for you can do better
Than to shut the eyes when your gut is open
I can no longer love but with rage in my heart
With fire in my blood, love like combat
I am as merciless as a brand-new brain
That knows satisfaction from its certainty
In the hand I take, I only see the hand
Whose shake isn’t any worthier than mine
It is more than enough for me to be grateful
In whose name to demand of jasmine
To be more than a scent, more star than flower
In whose name to demand of the body embracing me
To sow in me its sweetness forever, forever
And for you to cherish me because I loved you
More often than I should, because I am young
I drop anchor in my memory and I dread
When the shadow of my friends comes over my heart
When I see the face of my absent friends
Opening in place of my eyes—I am young
Which is not an excuse but a demanding duty
A duty so poignant as not to believe
How pleasant it is this evening by the beach
Caught in the absence of your shoulder—as not to believe
Standing like reed in my tongue the screams
Of my friends cut the bruised peace
Forever—in my tongue and in all the folds
Of the gleaming night—I can no longer love
But with this wound in my heart with this wound
In my memory tied like a net
A defused grenade the heavy night rolls
Beneath its oleanders where the sea ferments
With the smell of warm tar in the waves
I think of friends who died before they could be loved
I think of friends who were murdered
Because of the love they knew how to give
I can no longer love but with rage in my heart
At the groove of veined arms, the birds have come to drink
