Waiting For my Beloved to Descend
Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen
1
I have seen you standing
At the top of the stair.
A gold crown is upon your forehead
And a mysterious silver mantle is upon
Your icy shoulders.
The stair is as high as heaven
And as deep as hell.
I stand at the lowest foot of lowness bottom
As an armless rebel having nothing
But the stones of delight,
As an unknown poet,
As a foolish philosopher,
As a blind coachman.
I wait for you
To open your door of insults
That is full of bones and crippled whips.
Or to open the door of your mantle
So that your royal fresh body will appear
To capture my great sorrows, my obsessions and madness
That I had since Gilgamesh’s and Enkido’s time,
Since Enkido’s and Sargon’s time,
Since Sargon’s and Deek Aljen’s time
Since Deek Aljen’s time
And the time I put on Jinn’s clothes.
2
Now, the picture becomes very clear.
I get your greatest secret.
I stand to take care of your shadow
As a clown delighted in silliness of his audience
As a blind man delighted in the people’s complaint
Against the sun’s fire.
As a night lost its dawn in a lowered bar.
Now, all I hope from you is
To descend from your false height
To the foot of my daily lowness
So that to discover love
An ember put on the lips or between the eyes.
And to discover your cold loneliness
When you see thousands of my attendants of Jinn.
To recognize your utter ignorance
When my magical letters
And my dot colored with violence
Will jump before your astonished eyes.
3
My great myth,
Your scene is truly sad.
The stair has one thousand stairs
You stand on its cloud
And I in its black well.
Please, try to shorten the distance
By the delight of your height.
Please, try to kill the distance
By a flash of your body’s lower part.
And remember when you set
Your body’s seven continents on fire
That there is no mirror can know
Your seven languages
Except the mirror of my nakedness.
And no meaning for my crazy deprivation will exist
Unless you put my head on the spear,
And bear it to the sun’s four directions
In your black coach pulled by the dictators’ horses.
1. Gilgamesh is the hero of the famous Iraqi epic “Gilgamesh’s epic”, in which Gilgamesh searches hard for the secret of immortality. After many travels, he finds the seed of immortality but the snake soon steals it..
* Sargon: The great Assyrian King (from 705 to 721 B.C.) ruled a large kingdom in Iraq.
* Deek Aljen: The noted Arabic poet who loved his sweetheart deeply. After killing her in a moment of doubtfulness, he spent his final years writing great laments about her.
(T p)