Poetry

"Allegro" by Tomas Tranströmer, read by Christine Gosnay

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay. 

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. 

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles traveled
means something more than journey. 
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces. 
want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

- by Warsan Shire, Somali–British writer

[Yahia Lababidi left home...  http://www.onbeing.org/blog/paring-toward-tenderness-approaching-the-mystery/8160] 

No one leaves home unless... by Warsan Shire [read by Yahia Lababidi]

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke 
- translated by Stephen Mitchell 

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.


[ Yahia Lababidi's latest book is: "The Artist as Mystic" http://www.onesuchpress.com/index.php/books/121-the-artist-as-mystic ] 

Archaic Torso of Apollo, by Rainer Maria Rilke - Read by Yahia Lababidi

Elegy by Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robert Bly)

Street Crossing, by Tomas Tranströmer

Cold winds hit my eyes, and two or three suns
dance in the kaleidoscope of tears, as I cross
this street I know so well,
where the Greenland summer shines from snowpools.

The street's massive life swirls around me;
it remembers nothing and desires nothing.
Far under the traffic, deep in earth,
the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.

It seems to me that the street can see me.
Its eyesight is so poor the sun itself
is a gray ball of yarn in black space.
But for a second I am lit. It sees me.

- Translated by Robert Bly:  http://tomastranstromer.net/category/robert-bly/

[Yahia Lababidi is a Pushcart-nominated poet: http://www.berfrois.com/2012/10/yahia-lababidi-every-tweet/ ]

Street Crossing, by Tomas Tranströmer - read by Yahia Lababidi

Face to Face, by Tomas Tranströmer 

In February life stood still.
The birds refused to fly and the soul
grated against the landscape as a boat
chafes against the jetty where it’s moored.
The trees were turned away. The snow’s depth
measured by the stubble poking through.
The footprints grew old out on the ice-crust.
Under a tarpaulin, language was being broken down.
Suddenly, something approaches the window.
I stop working and look up.
The colours blaze. Everything turns around.
The earth and I spring at each other.

- Translated by Robin Robertson

[Yahia Lababidi on the Arab Spring:  http://newint.org/contributors/yahia-lababidi/ ]

Face to Face, by Tomas Tranströmer - read by Yahia Lababidi

Egyptian-American author of 11 critically-acclaimed books.  Lababidi's latest are: "Quarantine Notes" short meditations composed during our global pandemic & "Learning to Pray" a collection of his spiritual poems & aphorisms.

Amazon Author Page:  https://www.amazon.com/author/yahialababidi