A Road for Loss
Like the rest of you,
I thought of escape.
But I have a fear of flying,
a phobia of congested bridges
and traffic accidents,
of learning a new language.
My plan’s for a simple getaway,
a small departure:
pack my children in a suitcase
and to a new place we go.
Directions confuse me:
there’s no forest in this city,
no desert either.
Do you know a road for loss
that doesn’t end
in a settlement?
I thought of befriending animals,
the adorable type, as substitutes
for my children’s electronic toys.
And before anyone sacrifices another,
I want a place for getting lost.
My children will grow,
their questions will multiply,
and I don’t tell lies,
but teachers distort my words.
I don’t hold grudges,
but neighbors are always nosy.
I don’t reproach,
but enemies kill.
My children grow older,
and no one’s thought yet
to broadcast the last news hour,
shut down religious channels,
seal school roofs and walls,
end torture.
I don’t dare to speak.
Whatever I speak of happens.
I don’t want to speak.
I’d rather be lost.
Similarities
Give me one difference,
even if you mean justice,
pain, or history:
the hater resembles the hater
and the murderer, the murderer.
An aerially bombed building
looks like the blown-up one.
A child riddled with holes
resembles another torn apart.
A bereaved mother
resembles a mother in waiting.
Give me one difference,
after you drop justice
from your reply: justice
is the right of all who live
in the wrong places in this world,
the right of the aggrieved,
the weak with poor resources.
Justice isn’t a killer’s pretext,
a crutch for the malevolent,
or a sword for the unjust.
One difference
to hand over my kids to you
and resemble everyone else.
What If
Every time I leave the house,
it’s suicide,
and each return, a failed attempt.
What if burning tires exploded
and the soldiers went rogue?
What if teenagers turned radical
and the truck driver dozed off
at the wheel? What if
I find what I’m looking for?
I want to return home whole.
I mark the roads with crumbs
to help me come and go
until the birds
eat all my bread.
Like a Domestic Animal
I learned to gain the favor of homeowners,
gaze sadly into their eyes,
rub their shoulders.
My demands are basic:
some patting over my head
and clemency for my horrible daily deeds.
Like a domestic animal
I wait for their surplus of kindness,
their quick petting that signals
my self-removal from their vicinity
before they get bored
and toss me aside.
And when they’re asleep
I do what pleases me
with their persnickety arrangements,
reset their alarm clocks
to my barks and hunger
and door-scratching.
Tenderly I listen to no one.
And I nip, howl, and roll around
for approval, curses, and attention.
After
What do we do with secrets that remained secret,
with heaping corpses inside us
waiting to completely rot,
with a brimming happiness in smiles
no mirror reflected,
your love
that comes only after love has ended,
with reconciliation
after spatting lovers have died,
and devotion after the means
have become plenty . . .
what do we do with the roads
after the disappearance of paths
behind our hands, and after the discovery of lips
and all that’s happening now?
My House
None of the many houses I lived in
concern me. After the third house
I lost interest, but lately my organs and body parts
have been complaining of unexplainable ailments.
My arms extend higher than a tree.
My acromegaly. And when I run
it’s always at variable speed.
The important thing is to pass those walking
closest to me, leave them behind
before they leave me.
A Tunisian doctor
told my dad “It’s a psychiatric condition.”
I had liked her and considered her a house
before she spoke that sentence
which caused a lot of bruises
and brought down the house.
I read several texts I took for houses
and stayed in them a while: “Liquid Mirrors”
was a crazy abode in which I forgot
my first love. There were magazines, too:
Al-Karmal, Poets, and Aqwass,
then I studied engineering,
specialized in earthquakes
to build houses whose foundations
resist climates and the unexpected.
My children dug up a trench for me
and said, “Here, rest a bit, Mom.”
But trenches leave marks on skin
as if on a field, and the birds
gathered and pecked my seeds
after the field had drowned in stagnant water.
In a text, I can build a house
with windows and balconies
that overlook galaxies and stars,
paint it with the writings of Amjad Nasser
who said one should distinguish
between imagination and knowledge
for the sake of a solid house,
even if it’s built on illusion:
I will raise my house on the backs of horses
that will carry it to the fields,
there my legs will pause.
Six Poems
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Listen to the original read by the poet:
The poetry of Palestinian writer Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a celebration of, and a nod to, inimitable simplicity. Maya’s catalogs and leaps are not about creating musical awe or mental explosions. She stacks and files her contradictions, presences and absences, tragicomic pleasures, in stride—with lucid feelings, an illusory disappearance of hesitation: in rooms, streets, houses, on bookshelves or maps full of organized chaos and well-misplaced items. The misplacement is the poet’s agency against displacement. Her daily facts are transformed into tender truths. Her ordinary diction puts us in easy contact with our stratified consciousness and releases it from its compacted layers. Her interiority is the secret we each hold within and wait for her to give utterance to, as if before her verse reached us “no mirror [had] reflected” us back to us. Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s art is on the road to loss, a wandering that “doesn’t end/in a settlement.” She is far more than the history that wants to encapsulate her within it. Always approaching freedom, her poems feed the uncaged birds.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian novelist and poet who lives in Jerusalem. She has published two poetry collections, numerous children’s stories, and three novels. She is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. She contributed to, and wrote a forward for A Bird is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. She is also an editor of The Book of Ramallah, coming soon by Comma Press.
Fady Joudah has received various awards for his poetry and translations. His latest poetry collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, is from Milkweed Editions (2018). He lives in Houston, Texas.
