A Song and Three Questions - Amjad Nasser

I.
Talk is silver,
poetry is gold,
and women are the ringing of both metals.
Poems
will be our songs from now on.
Let’s start then without borrowings or embellishments
and look at the living things between us
with an eye for praise.
Let the song
celebrate our contentedness
and those joys only shepherds know,
whose song and the smell of their armpits
have spread
among goat paths and scrub grass
and who have disappeared never to return.

II.
Shall we blow into a silver trumpet?
But how can shepherds live without songs
and sheep
and desires?
No, we’ll sing,
How could there be shepherds without horses and violins
and wounds that never heal?

III.
Talk is silver,
poetry is gold,
and women are the ringing of both metals.
Poetry will be our songs from now on.
Let’s dedicate them
to those who will never return,
to the shepherds of freckled dawns,
to the chants dressed in wedding clothes,
to the women who loved the fiercest stags
and who preferred the Eros of copper,
spring grasses and buried wells,
falcons and night predators and the tiger of Arabia,
cymbals, bayonets, skiffs and saddles,
studded with the blood of the tribes,
the shouts of young lads yet to learn how to
tame their mares,
and the flight of whole tribes from open country
pulling hard at iron bits.

And even further than that—
broken flutes
and hollow bones
will surprise us with three questions:
How much time has passed?
Have the old wounds healed?
What names are still in use?
How do we answer?
Will it be enough to say,
Talk is silver, poetry is gold
and women are the ringing of both metals
and poetry will be our language from now on?

Fellow shepherds, let’s dig into our bowls filled to the brim.
Let us begin our chants.

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Amjad Nasser (born 1955) Jordan
Translated by Khaled Mattawa
Source: Diode