Portrait- It Is She Who Triumphed
Arabic Poem By: Saad Al-Hajji
At first, she was hiding
And holding her breath,
In the calm of a night just bathed
In the rain showers;
Suddenly, she started to breathe,
And slowly rise, red as a blaze,
In the heart of a dense jungle
swarming with black phantoms,
Phantoms that didn’t care, even for a moment,
To hide away from the eyes of beholders;
They, deliberately, invaded the vast horizon
Looming in the distance to the beholder
With their wickedly muffled laughter,
And their cunning and mocking gaze,
Together saying;
“How dare you look at us, and who could you be?
It’s us who bring black nightmares
to carefree slumbers,
And us who puff out the chills into shoulders
Kept warm by hearth embers,
We send monitors amid the stars;
Old witches riding brooms'
With fears and misgivings, roam the space;
Hey you! Don’t you listen?
Ah ... Aren’t you the one
Alleging to be Demozi the victimized?
And awaiting Astarte in a Babylonian moonlit night
To come to his underworld,
And take him up to the fertile spring?!
O You! O deluded dreamer..
We are princesses of the seven heavens
And the night chased on one hemisphere
by the other hemisphere...
There is no Astarte; she exists only in your
imagination."
Beauty was pronounced expressively through her
splendid silence
And slowly, she climbed the darkness walls
Up to the heart of the sky
Proclaiming the power of her light
With a glistening silvery face;
I feared the attack of a fierce predator upon her,
But the crowd of black phantoms went into deep
silence.
!With closed eyes pretending to sleep or hide
Gloating over their misfortune, I gazed at them,
And exclaimed:
“As if you don’t see her!
This wonderful, untouchable,
Dazzling beauty manifests herself over the horizon
She is rising above your dark and gloomy trees,
Disdaining the charred twigs of your houses,
Looking at me through the holy book of her heavens
Wth a smiling countenance,
Rising steadily and rapidly,
Extending her neck from darkness to life
And from lifelessness to birth;
She is silent with poise,
Uttering music,
Aflame in longing,
Passionate like lovers,
Overtly captivating,
Extravagantly generous
And inundating.
How amazing are your tragic pleasures, Oh life!
Woe to those who fancy you,
And woe to those who don’t!
Oh! How often you invited me to come to you,
From behind the walls
of water haze of early morns
When morning birds begin their songs
But here I am now
Receiving a cascade of light
From a moon, as well surprised;
That’s all in spite of the horizon,
With black, heavily-armed
Phantoms!
Translated into English By:
Inaam Al-Hashimi