Status Updates From أثر الفراشة

I watch as your absence accumulates over my head like a heavy sky. Even if you were not the absence you are, I would be the presence I am. As if you are with me. As if I am in the utmost need of the least thing.

No, I'm not a poet waiting to get his poem from the signals you give out. You and I - if we may be united in a single phrase, just as we are together here in one room - are light and airy guests on archetypal clouds, longing to fly to the trees of night, with no thought of a tomorrow that fails to prepare us to live without hope.

Your presence is translucent, and I do not know if your soul inhabited your body, or your body was clothed in your soul and shone like a pearl in my darkness. Form and substance are confused in my mind, and I see form as substance, and substance as the perfect form. I compete with you to be silent, so that I don't say something which plunges me back into the sort of clumsy improvisation I used before you.

I say what I say to you in language that needs the density of honey and the lightness of a butterfly, in the presence of this power that is capable of raising mere chance to the level of something unique and wonderful. For where does your silence take us, as it bestows upon obscure language the seductiveness of word-play? As if l have not written before, and learnt by heart what I wrote to you.

Even if you were not the dazzling presence you are, I would be the absence in you that I am - inside and out. Your presence is translucent, crystalline, I see gardens beyond it and am swept away to high wildernesses, inaccessible even to an imagination that is delighted by the range of metaphor and hindered by the poverty of everyday language.

We believe sometimes, and sometimes have no faith
but it is indifferent to us
When it hunts us down one by one
then slays us with a cool hand

It is a killer, and innocent.

It is animal/angel
with the power of a thousand horses, and the lightness of a ghost
equivocal, petulant, peaceable
Whenever it flees, it returns
It treats us well, and badly
it takes us by surprise when we forget our emotions
and arrives without warning
It's an anarchist/an egoist/
master/one and only/multiple

It is love, like a wave
Recurrence of our bliss, old, new
quick, slow
innocent as a gazelle racing a bicycle
and obscene, like a rooster
Reckless like someone in need
moody and vicious
calm as imagination arranging its phrases
Dark, gloomy, and bursting into light
Empty and full of its contradictions

The woman I will see tomorrow in the same setting, I also know. She is my daughter whom I left in the middle of the poems so that she could learn to walk, then fly, beyond this setting, and perhaps earn the admiration of the viewers and disappoint the snipers. For a clever friend said to me: 'It's time for us to move on, if we can, from a subject that makes people pity us to one that makes them envy us.'

The woman I'm seeing now in the same image on a colour TV screen, I have known well for forty years. She is my sister, following in the footsteps of our mother journeying in the wilderness: fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge.

That hurrying woman, crowned with a wool blanket and a pitcher of water, dragging a boy in her right hand and his sister in her left, followed by a herd of frightened goats, that woman fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge - I have known her for sixty years. She is my mother who left me behind at a crossroads with a basket of dry bread, a candle, and a box of matches ruined by the damp.

We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception

We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets

We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer's belly

We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details

We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful!'

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others

We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinne

We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan's gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial

But we have a difficult mission to perform: mediation between God and the Devil to get them to call a brief truce so that we can bury our martyrs.

They don't know if they will return safely to what remains of houses encircled by bulldozers and tanks and smashed cypress trees. Life is so indifferent it seems to be no more than a rough draft of some stubborn urge to have one's presence registered: equal rights with jackals to enjoy a safe cave.

The news searches for their names under the rubble. Apart from that, abnormal life appears to be running its normal course. The Devil still boasts of his long quarrel with God. Individuals, if they wake up alive, can still say 'Good morning,' then go off to their normal jobs: burying the dead.

Low pressure area.Northwesterly winds, heavy showers. Grey wrinkled sea. Tall cypresses. Today the autumn clouds let thirty martyrs fall in the north of Gaza, among them two women taking part in a demonstration to demand a share of hope for their kind. Clear skies. Calm blue sea. Northerly winds. Good visibility.But the autumn clouds—the symbolic name for killing—wipe out an entire family, made up of seventeen lives.

J’essaie de le finir ce soir

The astrologers said: 'It is the chaos of existence at the door of the last judgement.' Luckily or unluckily for us, foreign historians, experts on our destinies and our oral history, were not here, so we don't know what happened to us!

, and when they opened their windows they saw spiders spinning their webs in the snow and went blind. When they tried to hear what was going on, storms arose, whose wild sounds were unfamiliar to them, and they went deaf.

If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general. If war is an accident on the motorway, then the living have a duty to vote: we will choose the donkey. But the living did not go to the ballot box, not because the snow was falling in big flakes, but because a sudden paralysis afflicted the city's inhabitants,

And at night we see it twinkling with stars, which gaze at us with affection. We also see what lies behind the snake wall: the watchmen in the ghetto, frightened of what we're doing behind the little walls we still have left. We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

A snake eager to lay its eggs between our inhalations and exhalations so that we say for once, because we are nearly choking to death, 'We are the strangers.' When we look in our mirrors all we see is the snake making for the backs of our necks, but with a bit of effort we can see what is above it: a sky yawning with boredom at the architects adorning it with guns and flags.

A huge metal snake coils around us, swallowing up the little walls that separate our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. A snake that does not move in a straight line, to avoid resembling us as we look straight on. It twists and turns, a nightmare of cement segments reinforced with pliant metal, making it easy for it to move into the fragmented bits of land and beds of mint that are left to us.