A son
A park runs through the girl.
A flag of bright-blue balloons sails through the sky
crows cut right across it.
The girl falls onto the grass, solid black-green-grey, grass that’s damp
because a boxer just slept there
and cried, wearing his champion’s belt.
There is a son
standing in the distance at a broken traffic light.
His worn-out wings smell of old newspapers and Silver Haze.
The son’s Nikes are filthy with mud
he smokes a cigarette
scratching at the flakes of leaf and ash between his wings.
The music in his ear is a minor rebellion, a dyke of sound and narcosis.
On the corner there’s a group of boys, all brightly coloured contours
their eyes bigger than their faces
crowns floating above their heads like halos.
The streets are broken mirrors in the dark.
The son is alone.
The windows in the flats are alight with candles, eyes, desires
holes, near-orgasms
embraces
voids
unpaid bills
arrears, debts, ambitions and children
who dress in the rage they found in rocks
in papers and in their mothers’ tears.
The heat from the tower blocks is seeking the night.
The night’s seeking itself.
The night’s too restless, can’t sit still
night and all its names
all its faces, all its sexes.
The traffic light is broken and the girl’s in the wet grass and they all know.
Twelve balloons drift across the sky like darkness’ young
and the crows follow, heedless.
The buzz of an insect. Darkness creaking, grinding. There’s smoke from spliffs, smoke from incense, smoke from smokes, smoke from explosions, smoke from the white and brown
there’s smoke on stage.
Once you leave the house
your mind is
sliced open
by all the varying conditions.
There are screams.
Something rips open.
In the alleyways, a stirring in the shadows—a reptilian thing
with hundreds of tentacles
leaving a glistening trail of slime on the buildings.
The moon smokes some coke
telling myths to the children and the women,
the dealers,
asylum seekers, alcoholics,
poets, cleaners,
the revolutionaries living in the same block of flats.
The light is snake
the boys look up at the moon
the flawless empress with her delicate shapes
sovereign
& her radical hedonism
they celebrate her public masturbations.
On an old chair a radio crackles:
See, I’m old enough to know that ain’t no justice
Fuck all the courts same way they fucked us
And why the hell am I locked in jail?
They let them white boys free, we be shocked as hell
A bolt of light breaks
the night sky
but it’s an illusion
not
a metaphor
despite the bolt
the night’s still whole
immaculate.
Myths and traffic lights
The body wrapped in contingencies
is chased by a soul
in a dark space filled with the noise of a past.
In the distance, swallows soar over mountain tops. A brook splashes
through cool strips of green. There’s no roof on this inn.
I wring out my heart: rain, thunderclouds, syntax
broken laws, downtempo jazz.
What can refute the arguments of my wounds?
Wandering down that long street, with all those faces
all the costumes I wore, the men I gave false names to
and the women I lied to out of shame.
There is no fire in poetry.
I looked and looked, looked for fire and hammers,
finding only reflections in the haze
useless for building foundations.
In poetry I found a spiralling expansion, a sense of germination.
As if I were a crop growing in language. As if I were more
than a chest filled with discourse stowed in a body.
from Myths and Traffic Lights
Alara Adilow
translated from the Dutch by Shimanto Robin Reza
Listen to a recording of "Myths and Traffic Lights" read in the original Dutch by the translator:
Alara Adilow has lived many lives. I was lucky enough to get to spend several days with her, spread over a number of weeks at a festival and residency. During our conversations, I would often discover a new chapter of her personal story, each of which might last another person a lifetime; I’m still not entirely sure how it all fits together. During those same conversations, I found myself speaking with someone who was all of a piece, a person of depth and warmth who loved to connect. Similarly, her poetry is rooted in the different parts of her life and her wide reading, but on its own terms, retains poetic integrity.
Her poems often have a traditional form or rhythmic foot running in the background for them to dip in and out of. In my translation, I adopted a similarly fluid approach. I chose formal patterns and let them emerge where this made sense within the English text. In addition to this fluidity, there is a sharpness of image in Alara’s poetry, often reflected in simple declarative sentences: “In the distance, swallows soar over mountaintops. A brook splashes / through cool strips of green.”
During the residency, I was also lucky enough to receive mentoring from two highly skilled and experienced poetry translators, Michele Hutchison and David Colmer. They managed both to fill my head with bucketloads of teachings and give me the liberating sense that there was no ultimate answer, that creative solutions were warranted and necessary. I hope these English versions manage to convey the dynamic between restraint and fluid expression that electrify Alara’s poetry.
Her poems often have a traditional form or rhythmic foot running in the background for them to dip in and out of. In my translation, I adopted a similarly fluid approach. I chose formal patterns and let them emerge where this made sense within the English text. In addition to this fluidity, there is a sharpness of image in Alara’s poetry, often reflected in simple declarative sentences: “In the distance, swallows soar over mountaintops. A brook splashes / through cool strips of green.”
During the residency, I was also lucky enough to receive mentoring from two highly skilled and experienced poetry translators, Michele Hutchison and David Colmer. They managed both to fill my head with bucketloads of teachings and give me the liberating sense that there was no ultimate answer, that creative solutions were warranted and necessary. I hope these English versions manage to convey the dynamic between restraint and fluid expression that electrify Alara’s poetry.
Alara Adilow is a Dutch poet and author of Somali descent. Her debut poetry collection Mythen en Stoplichten (Myths and Traffic Lights; Prometheus, 2022) was published to critical acclaim and recently won the best debut category of the C. Buddingh Prize, an important Dutch poetry award. In her raw and visceral work tackling themes of gender, queerness and the desire to escape the body, Adilow celebrates the beauty of language while drawing the reader into dark, fantastic and grotesque worlds. Her poetry spans topics including religion, spirituality, exorcism, fornication and politics, in a mind-spinning exploration of the sensuality of the world.
Shimanto Robin Reza is a translator from Dutch and Italian with an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia. He is also an experienced editor of translated prose.
