Hallucination - Zohra Mansouri

I emerge from myself, like an exotic bird.

I absorb the strangeness of the place,

Drawing a sea with the bones of men.

White salt spills from their sockets,

Gulls soothe the emptiness of bridges in exile

And the wrinkles on the wan horizon.

How shall I find the exile of my bridges,

Wind-forest that I am, stirring up dust,

Discovering other suns, counting my mortal remains?

Smoke issues from my body;

My decadent flesh

Bestows its mysteries on the spirits,

Prepares the pallor of the night.

The ocean churns in my depths,

As do beginnings

And the lesion of names.

My trembling rises from this emptiness.

Confession resists me still.

My remains I conceal in dreams.

My path into the bush

Divides the face of the world

And the moon, encircled, drifts off to sleep,

Drops into the hollow of the heart.

I shall reconstruct the exploits of time.

On flesh shall I draw the ways into death.

Space is a glass of water I spike with salt,

When it ages I gulp it down,

I destroy it within me,

And we become eroded clouds,

Moon shards for vesperal pageants

Or nocturnal ports.

---

Zohra Mansouri (born 1961) Morocco

Translated by Said Arifoulous and Gz!y Bennett

Source: Aufgabe 5, Fall 2005