Tishuash - Badi

All that has been has gone,

(how great the living and everlasting God!)

but how beautiful this scene is!

I see it sometimes –

no particular place –

just there with the goats,

like those nights I spent

at the mouth of a well,

making the wet sand my bed.

Enchanted by night’s music:

the howl of wild dogs

and insects’ whine.

Or in the watering season,

when the wheat is still to produce its seed,

I am there in the midst of the life of the camp,

doing some little thing about which you do not need to ask.

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Badi [Mohamed Mustafa Mohamed Salem] (1936 - 2019) Western Sahara

Translated by Sam Berkson and Mohamed Labat Sulaiman

Source: Settled Wanderers, by Sam Berkson & Mohamed Sulaiman, Influx Press, 2015

Tishuash  - roughly ‘nostalgia’, but perhaps more correctly, ‘the pleasure of remembering things

that are past.’