Selene - Ashur Etwebi

to my father

Selene the Enchanting City

The sail gazes drenched with the water of the sea at Selene the enchanting.

Selene is imprisoned in walls of reticent sand,

A Sicilian sailor said in a port tavern:

We were in the three ships that skilled men built from the black forest,

loaded with a tractor of wine from Damascus

and ebony wood from the land of the blacks in the center of Africa,

and in the front of the round space were dancing doves from Tripoli,

and there were slaves in the lowest part of the ship

singing with a sad voice, and the lookout was in the heights of ship watching for us.

We heard a sailor in the last row dyeing his melody yellow,

the melody dried his face for us. And we were on a stretch of sighs

from a land that we dreamed of in private and didn’t quiet

when he mentioned her name by accident or intentionally,

and whatever the lips say is far from the hands,

so don’t open your mouth on a letter among letters.

The lookout says from the ship’s heights: I see land and trees and date palms. The men shout on the ship’s deck until we almost touch the name.

No, don’t do it, says the oldest of us, Not until we land.

 

Selene the Brazen City

After the drunks left last night, a sailor from Sicily turned to the tired waiter and said:

In Selene, I had a wife and son. I’d been roaming the sea for months, and when I returned to her,

cruelty and tension left my body as she massaged me with radiant olive oil

like the shore’s breath at dusk. As for what thickened in the heart, of doubt

and fear and grief, she flung from her pillow’s heights over the wall watching the sea.

 

Selene the Frightened City

The Sicilian sailor sitting in the hunter’s courtyard said:

I was a tender youth and lacking in experience when we lowered the sail in her port.

In winter at that time there were robbers on the roofs of houses,

waiting for drunks and youths.

At the tavern, we pointed out a seller of cooked chickpeas,

warned of danger in the bend of an alley and a wall’s curve.

He said: Don’t look into the eyes of a man you don’t know,

and don’t enter a house where you don’t own its key,

and don’t ever follow a woman into darkness,

and don’t and don’t and don’t……

The sail was wrapped around its wooden body, suppressed and drowsy,

and there were the ship’s lamps, their breath dying out.

We walked kingly in her streets, laughing and singing

and rapping on her doors with insults this time.

There was nothing in the place except eyes that peeked furtively at prey or humiliation

or hands clutching their fear silently.

I didn’t see in my long boisterous life a city of greater fear than Selene.

 

Selene the Treacherous City

Those departing to the desert wilderness sealed her mouth with:

a line of four beaks and white ostrich feathers,

a towel with gilded juices and a branch of green pomegranate,

a dried plum and hot black bread.

With the thread of near distant time,

Selene

hangs there,

hangs here,

hangs forever

on the fingers

of a blind sea.

---

Ashur Etwebi (born 1952) Libya

Translated by: Rasheeda Plenty

Source: Create and Do

Selene: the goddess of the moon for the ancient Greeks.

Selene: a small Roman town located east of the city of Tripoli adjacent to the city of Greater Leptis Magna that was the capital of the world in the agreement of the emperor Septimus Severus. There was a possibility that King Juba the second (born in the year 50 before Christ and died in the year 24 after Christ) who was king of Numidia (Leptis Magna, Sabratha, and Tripoli) and then overtook the farthest kingdom of Morocco, built it and gave it the name of his wife, Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra from Anthony. Nothing remained of Selene except ruins filled by the creeping sand from the Sahara and a large villa on the shores on the sea coast that was found in the year 1974 to contain drawings and mosaics in stunning designs.

In my childhood, my father would say that the grapes of Selene had no match for him in the world.