I have no home except what I have walked By the poet Walid Alzoukani – Syria

 

I have no home except what I have walked

By the poet Walid Alzoukani – Syria

 

Our home is a bag, on the floor, on a chair, on a table..

We put it down and go to sleep.

So that language doesn't become a nail,

we speak with our fingers.

They say: Where are you from? 

We point to the bag.

Our country is on our shoulders, and before us is God's country.

We have no roots.

Our legs are not made of wood, nor of prayers.

What drives us to become firewood?

 

***

The poor dig their days with the axes of despair,

and nurture hope in their children's beds.

The remains of birds that planted joy in their beaks

Great graveyards swayed in their heads, waiting for God.

The muezzin rings the sky with a copper crescent,

But God, as he tending the stars in the pastures of eternity,

had cast down the rebellious point and said:

Be pale blue, be a graveyard for the disobedient

but it slipped away from him, and it became the earth.

 

***

O pale dot, O earth, O spring of water and cloak of greenery, 

Where are you going?

Your waters are stagnant, and your cloak is worn.

And when the angels whispered to him:

“The rebels are about to open the bottle of matter.”

he thought of becoming a highwayman,

but he could not set foot in the crowd of minarets and bells and spy towers and antennas.

He saw how death plants its instruments among their instruments,

hanging them with threads of pain, so he gave it the word and ascended.

Death was nothing but a beautiful god,

A blind god, driving an eternal ambulance, Rarely late.

***

I have no home, no homeland except what I have walked,

But dust is a blind eraser, Carrying the crutch of the sky and walking behind me,

The she camel of the air carries the aging earth on its back

like a straw basket of sand and remorse,

My house is not walls and ceiling

It is a path, and the horizon is my window.