Two strangers, we pick a path through the barren land,
Patiently swaying between steps.
In our hands, we cradle a blade of grass a jewel of silk
Scarcely visible,
Yet heavy with the scent of clay,
Fed by the corpses of those who came before.
We plant an ancient tune
Upon a grave of jade lips,
Then smother it beneath a veil of fog.
And like a gut’s acidic groan,
The cry of want rings out
So we limp from the abyss, craving palms,
Toward a tide of antique grief,
Into the shadowed seasons of the wind.
We stretch, ebb and flow,
Toward the Gulf’s thick spawn
Chaotic as the clouds’ selection.
In our fists, water’s green churns,
While metaphor thunders inside,
Echoing into the eternity of songs.
We parade in silence,
Nearly birthing a bastard word of belonging
So we carve a sleek slab of grins,
Masks from doves’ tails,
The hush of darkness,
And fur plucked from dogs.
We sew our faces into the skin of speech,
Mending the sparrow’s flight between gullets.
We slit the mirage’s eye
For truth’s core is a womb of revelation,
And in its heart,
Doubt throbs
Doubt: the soul of certainty,
While certainty breeds cells of madness,
Spawned from hope and distrust.
It’s the pulse,
Our eternal sulfur,
Melting into the marrow’s script
Penned by the Power we crave.
Then forgotten, like a whale
That swallows us into absence’s fringe.
Must birth come from a wound’s gaping mouth?
The wind toys with the tangled olive branches
deep in my body,
while nakedness complains—
it never spun itself into the night’s allure,
nor stitched it with ancient meteors.
And I, alone, have only one cloak:
wool, my favored wisdom.
Whenever I contemplate it, silence clamors through me.
There’s an unease between my flesh and skin,
a creeping like a bubble of pins.
I carry a stone and a blade-hollowed gourd,
trapping fire within them,
following the trail of twin hoofprints on my back.
I plow my spine,
sow seeds of thought, contemplation, and certainty in ignorance.
When they sprout, I reap,
mount the curse of the threshing floor,
then grind,
sift excessively till eyes and ribs curve inward,
knead, and dig from the cerebellum’s yard
down to the heart’s ventricle.
Then I hurl the stone and gourd through the slit—
till the idea ignites.
I bake letters slowly,
and spread my feast upon the palm of my hand.
Among golden wrestlers I wove my years
yet I have not reached my full strength.
I have not stepped westward, where the sun beckons,
and my hand still clutches an udder of mirage.
Each time it slips away, it returns again,
a penitent spring retreating,
perhaps to quench what still smolders in its hidden folds.
And I become a fist
breathing into the leather of the earth,
or into the salt flats and silt,
or into the red, the void, and the pale
in its gentle lisp and earthen sorrow.
Here, I knead myself with the bitterness of my own water,
with the sweet and the brine,
so the clay may rise, and I may be soaked.
My heart might shudder
and cause me to forget.
I parch now.
I have not yet reached my full strength.
But my clay still clings
shattered, like ancient prophetic pottery.
Blow into me.
Your scent thick as revelation will coil,
unwillingly, through the labyrinth of my skull,
and stretch toward the nostrils’ appointed hour
not sneezing roses,
but perhaps sowing them across the orchards of my tongue,
before my ribs and breastbone unfurl.
No limb lifts me in haste,
and I crave nothing of food.
Yet my belly is full of hunger, of longing, of musk.
And in my head remnants of verse,
clay-streaked,
fractured with the shimmer
of a revelation still to come...
*Raed Anis Al-Jishi: An international awarded poet and translator from Qatif - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His work had been translated into many languages. He was educated in the city of Qatif and graduated from King Faisal University in Al-Ahsa with a Bachelor degree in chemistry. He holds an honorary fellowship in writing from the University of Iowa (USA). He was a resident guest there in 2015. Poems from his English collection "Bleeding Gull" were selected to be studied within the contemporary literature curriculum. And some of his poems from his Arabic collection “A Composition for the Memory of Passion” as part of the Master’s in Translation at the first and advanced levels at the same university . The English book was translated into several languages, including Vietnamese, Serbian, Italian, and Spanish. He obtained several degrees in American literature from Harvard University. He has published several poetry collections, the most recent is “Clay Tablets in Nietzsche's Cave”. This book has been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Uzbek, and has won several international awards, the most recent of which was at the Karmanov International Festival in North Macedonia. He won several international awards and his authored or translated works were published in many magazines. He is also an editor in “Contemporary Dialogues” (North Macedonia).