Venice masks

Thursday, 22 March 2018

An Alien Land - Muhammad Salih

They invite me to breakfast in another language.
Like a blind man in the streets of the city
They lead me in only three or four words of another language.
They show me a star in another language.
They awaken me in the dawn in that language.
I am afraid not of my own language
But forgetting those three or four words
In this great city.
If my homeland is my dream,
The homeland is my dream because,
I speak in my own language
Only in my dream.

Muhammad Salih (born 1949) Uzbekistan
Translator unknown
Source: Literature and Politics: Mohammed Salih and Political Change in Uzbekistan from 1979 to 1995, by Ruth Deibler, Indiana University,1996

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