He Doesn't Know
The wet bird has a story,
Only Sulaiman and Ahmad realize it,
When he reaches the sun,
with his fingertips.
The bird has a birth certificate, an ID card,
and a passport.
He prays, performs hajj,
and barely reads.
He deactivates the effect of sorcery
with the amulets of feathers.
He forgets his parents.
He doesn't know if he was an orphan
or whether they picked him up from the street
(Translated by Dr. Sara Hamid Hawass)
Don't Lie the Sun
I am not ambiguous,
to the extent that a butterfly
gets confused in understanding me,
or to the extent that the sky doubts,
the name of my soul.
Only when I love,
I grant myself,
until I have nothing left but you.
I open the box,
until the sea runs out of words.
So I throw two stones of doubt,
and two arrows of the perfume of qualms.
(Translated by Dr. Sara Hamid Hawass)
With Two Letters of his Name
On my last point,
my ship got lost,
and I don't want Noah
to tell his people :
I was perished,
and my ship was sunk.
I want him to write,
in his notebooks :
he was a lover.
He resisted the deluge.
He didn't run away as a mouse.
He saw the fire in the distance,
then the water,
was transformed into a road of gold.
(Translated by Dr. Sara Hamid Hawass)
Author’s Bionote:
*Ahmad Al-Shahawy (1960) is a poet, novelist, critic, essayist and journalist. Born in Damietta (an eastern distributary of the Nile Delta, 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea, about 200 kilometers north of Cairo.) Ahmad Al-Shahawy is the author of more than 20 books and poetry collections. Four of his books achieved sales exceeding one hundred and thirty thousand copies, and all of them were published in the ‘’Family Library…Reading for all’’ project in Egypt. His poems have been translated into many languages including French, Italian, English, Turkish and Spanish. He attended the International Writing Program in the United States in 1991. He was also the recipient of UNESCO Literature Prize in 1995, and Cavafy Poetry Prize in 1998. He was awarded a fellowship in literature from the University of Iowa, USA, on December 12, 1991.In September 1994; he obtained a special diploma in culture and science from the Ionic Center, Greece. He is also a member of the International Encyclopedia of Who's Who Poetry since 1992. In October 1995, he participated in the Creative Program of the Gerasi Foundation - San Francisco - California. In 2004, The International Poetry Festival - Rotterdam - published two books of poetry anthologies of Ahmad Al-Shahawy in English and Dutch. He is also a Member of the Poetry Committee of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Culture - Cairo, October 2001-2006. The poet Ahmed Al-Shahawy gave poetry readings in about fifty countries around the world, and hundreds of cities in these countries, especially the countries he traveled to dozens of times, presenting solo poetry evenings, or participating and opening international poetry festivals around the World. Since July 1987, he has been touring the horizons, traveling in literary, cultural and poetic trips to the several countries of the world attending and participating in cultural and poetry festivals.