A to Z - Gaarriye

Caalin, listen, I'm going to travel

From A to Z carried by language -

The alphabet, alive on the page.

 

I write the words and send them to you;

You sing to the wind and the crows as they fly

Carry my lines through the noonday sky

Chanting each to each. The ants

Become orators. The gossiping camels

Crowd the waterhole, eager for rumours.

 

Even the trees, as they rustle their leaves,

Are sharing a joke; the sheep and goats

Talk tough as they sniff out the latest news.

The hum of the breeze in the river-bed

Is the language of pride; the termites talk

With a tap and a touch; the clouds compose

Poems as only they can; the land

Speaks in prose of growth and gain

And the sound of rain in the season of rain

Rumbles like thunder and why this should be

Is something only the rain can explain.

 

I write these words and send them to you

To let you know that we live through language.

Without it - deformity, ugliness, illness;

Without it - no anchor for culture; without it

No making of maps, no naming of nations.

 

A man might boast of property, money,

Position, but if he's unable to write

He's a pauper. Caalin, listen, your pen

Is your wealth, you're less than nothing without it.

 

Ask the old Gods how our culture has grown.

Think back to the time when our language suffered

One onslaught after the other: invasions,

Armies crossing our borders, the songs

Our fathers once sang destroyed or derided,

Our epics fading in memory, even

Our idioms gradually losing their meanings.

 

Every lost syllable tells in my heartbeat,

Every lost line is a scar on my heart.

Poems go hand-over-hand to create

A chain of wisdom, a chain that goes

From strength to strength; when this was shattered,

When our chain of poems was broken and scattered,

We were left with nothing but fragments, nothing

But scraps of wisdom - our inheritance

Nothing more than a handful of images.

 

Our story - a story so ancient that only

The Old Gods recall it - was gone forever.

Our children will never recover that wisdom:

Our legends and myths and the words of the prophets...

 

Remember the time when a man from the north

Wrote a letter received by a man from the south

And the second man threw the letter away,

Since the first man's language was foreign to him?

 

Remember the time when a camel was owned

By two men who needed to talk things through,

So a third man came in as interpreter?

 

Remember how politicians decided

To give us a written language? Remember

The fighting and feuding, the shouting and swearing?

Ten years went by with nothing decided

Until someone in power said, ‘Latin!' and then

Somalia sat down and uncapped its pen.

 

I dreamed of that day! The pen and the page -

A poet's stock-in-trade. The choice

Finally made. The alphabet

Taking the first few steps of a journey

And never looking back. A new age

Of wisdom in poetry, yes, a new

Tradition! Go, now, and wake Sayid -

Give him the news, tell all the great

Poets our language lives again,

And this time written to last in lines

That can't be lost or thrown away.

 

Caalin, write lyrics, write epics, write verse

That beats in the brain and tells on the pulse;

Write poems of love, write poems that show

How myths can revive and language grow.

 

Enough! I've written all that I need

To write, except to praise the men

Who talked the language into being -

Statesmen, thinkers, poets, who gave

Somali poets a new way with words.

We could raise a statue to them and set it

Above the image of Jupiter...

Or perhaps we should honour them in poems

That use all the letters from A to Z.

---

Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac 'Gaarriye' (1949 - 2012) Somalia

Translated by Martin Owen and David Harsent

Source: Poetry Translation Centre