Introduction
 The Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 in the Al Wehdat refugee camp in Jordan, where his parents had taken refuge in 1948. He lived in the camp for thirty-three years, attending the school sponsored by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), and later studying at the UNRWA Teacher Training College, in Amman. He is the author of fourteen books of poems and the recipient of numerous poetry awards, and has also gained wide recognition as a novelist, photographer, and journalist.
In Nasrallah’s poetry there is an unusual relationship of image to narrative. Returning figures, animate and inanimate, play host to the dramatic narratives they engender – by turns knowing and forlorn, often drawn out until the lyrical information accumulated begins to beckon to the reader like a parable.
These effects forge an intimacy between the reader and the poems. Often stately in tone, the work conveys a sense of distance and otherness and a loneliness felt in the interplay of solidarity and isolation, in the fragility of human connections, in the persistence of cruelty and injustice.
But if the universe Nasrallah conjures is often harsh, it is also a place of mystery and abundance where we sense the vast life the ordinary things around us are part of – and a place where we see everyday things strangely and magically living out their lives on their own.
In Nasrallah’s work images cascade, but they are not ornamental: like the details in a thangka painting, they are evocative and functional psychic entities that don’t allow us to tease apart the personal, historical, political and cosmic, as they converge in an obdurate fate – a fate revealed to us in piercing glimpses in this poetry.
Rick London – 10 Jan 09
from Rain Inside
poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah
translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London
Beginnings
When all the birds in the world flap their wings in unison
as one body, when the waters of springs and mountain streams
gather in a dusty palm,
when a human being runs
and trees and the hidden future follow him,
when the world becomes simple
and I can climb onto a table in the office of the daily news
and speak of your love to the elegant shuttered windows,
to the good and bad paintings on the walls,
when I am able to freely place a gentle kiss
on your cheek in public,
when I am able to return with you after midnight
without a police patrol desecrating our bodies
in search of a confession,
when we can run in the streets
without anyone pronouncing us crazy,
when I am able to sing
and share a stranger’s umbrella
and when she in turn may share my loaf of bread,
when you are able to say I love you
without fear of death or imprisonment
and I can open a window in the morning
without being silenced by a bullet,
when I am able to grow older
and the trees are added to your attire
and we can count the drops of rain on each other’s faces
and can sing and love free of weapons,
raids, chronic fear, and disappearances -
another world will begin,
a new homeland will have been readied.
But for now we announce a new beginning with our death,
a new beginning of love.
The Returnee
Every day the emigrant comes home from death
to the shadows of his walls,
to his reading lessons,
he crawls to the shadows to rest under the quiet cinchona.
The emigrant comes home from death
to draw out breath from the chain of stone around his house,
from his milk-white feet,
from the rattling air.
He knows the trees,
the angles of the old houses,
the sound of his mother’s footsteps in the backyard,
the stories his great grandmother tells to put the mischievous young ones to sleep.
She plucks night stars as she wishes, after they have entered sleep.
He passes by like a stranger
though he doesn’t resemble a stranger in any way.
The people he sees standing now at his door
are the strangers…
A Beautiful Morning
A beautiful morning
is one that passes and I am not killed.
A city street following the sun at sunset
is obstructed by a roadblock and soldiers.
Another street runs after her
and never returns.
A beautiful morning…
***
On the road I embrace an old woman’s sadness
and woo her.
Yesterday laughs inside her
as she whispers: Am I still youthful?
Then she smiles and prays for me.
***
I ruffle the hair of a small boy selling newspapers
and ask: Anything new?
Like every other morning he hands me
the chronicles of thirty years and a thousand moons.
He argues with me, then goes away shouting:
Newspapers.
The inspectors kill him,
but it is his habit to return to the streets
selling newspapers the following morning.
A beautiful morning…
***
At the abyss of long waiting
I slip into a restaurant on a side street
and turn my eyes to the faces of passersby
and as I lean back in my metal chair
the fear of her not showing up gnaws at me.
With my last bite of bread
she surprises me briefly
in the face of an excited young woman,
but I realize the difference between them.
At the abyss of waiting
the road branches out in my body
and traffic lights blink on and off.
Many people cross
but no one is here.
***
Her sorrow makes her come at last
and like a flower she bids me good evening.
I say: You are late.
- You know the wide streets are clogged with security points.
We walk together with her hand in mine.
She permeates the pores of my flesh.
The street becomes noisy:
Soldiers, soldiers!
They surround me and shoot at my forehead,
then read out my rights!
I am left in her arms like a corpse on an open road.
A beautiful morning…
***
Tomorrow, when the sun touches my forehead,
I will ruffle the hair of a young boy
and like every other morning he will hand me
the chronicles of thirty years and a thousand moons
and together we will sell his wares.
My beloved will pass by …
to buy the daily paper from me.
She will ruffle my hair
and like the seasonal trees go to her appointment.
A beautiful morning…
A Special Invitation
My corpse hovered over a sea of silence.
My house was a cloud of dust,
the streets were a wild extinguishing dream
and the night was like the face of a friend divided
between silence and earning one’s keep.
The trees opposed their own colors
and the wind opposed riding a song,
a bird in the air was a period
then a comma in conversation.
The sky was arid.
After being killed I washed by the river
and the green along its banks
and when the mourners were late
I rushed to a wave in my mind and plucked a song.
I sang it for two whole nights until it waned
and broke like a mast.
When they were late
I turned onto every path to darkness,
like the soul breaking over the rims of flowers and wooden cups
and said: They will catch up with me on the way.
The road was lonesome and the moon ripped apart my body
although this was not the Age of War.
* * *
My funeral proceeds on its own
moved by the power of darkness to the grave site.
I heard him ask: Where are they?
I recognized him by his clothes, his fear, his blue face,
the blood on the collar of his shirt,
by the bullets embedded in his flesh.
I recognized him, I did.
But the mourners were late.
So I said: Invite my killer…
Bio notes
Omnia Amin was born in Cairo, Egypt. She earned her doctorate in Modern English Literature and Feminist Theory at the University of London and is an Associate Professor at the College of Arts & Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai.
Rick London’s latest publication is the poetry collection The Materialist (Doorjamb Press, 2008). He lives and works in San Francisco.
Translations by Omnia Amin and Rick London:
Now, As You Awaken, by Mahmoud Darwish (Sardines Press, 2006).
The Novel (Interlink Press, 2008).
Rain Inside (Curbstone Press, April, 2009).
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