Capítulo 6: SISTEMA DE MONITOREO DE LA OPERACIÓN DE CAMPO
6.5 Control de avance diario
F L O W E R O F A L C H E M Y
I must travel to a paradise of ashes, walk among its hidden trees.
In ash, myths, diamonds, and golden Reece.
I must travel through hunger, through roses, toward harvest. I must travel, must rest
under the bow of orphaned lips.
On orphaned lips, in their wounded shade the A ower of that old alchemy.
6o
T R E E O F T H E E A S T
I have become a mirror. I have reflected everything.
In your fire I have changed the ritual of water and plant. I have changed the shape of sound and call.
I have begun to see you as two, you and this pearl swimming in my eye. Water and I have become lovers. I am born in the name of water and water is born within me. We have become twins.
T R E E O F W I N D I N G C U R V E S
I n the fields of melancholy, o n grass, I draw my rainbow days breaking the surfaces of mirrors between the noonday sun and the water in Adam's pool.
My years Aoat like hunger then descend to a forest of winding curves. Years and years
I see their beaks entangle,
then fall in a forest of winding curves into their eternal nests.
T R E E O F F I R E
A clan of! eaves throngs around a spring. They scrape the land of tears when they read fire's book to the water below.
My clan did not wait for me. They left,
no fire, no trace.
M O R N I N G T R E E
Morning, come meet me toward our field-
on the road to our field. Dried up trees, as I'd promised, two beds as before, two children in their dried-up shade.
Come meet me. Have you seen the boughs, heard their call,
the sap their words leave behind? Words that hold eyes in their grasp words that pierce through stone. Come meet me
come
as if we'd met before woven the fabric of the dark
and dressed up in it, knocked on its door, lifted the curtain opened its windows and lay
64 Migrations and Transfonnations in the Regions of Night and Day
as if we'd sought the help of our eyelids and poured the pitcher of tears and dreams,
as if we'd remained in the land of boughs and lost our way home.
T R E E O F M E L A N C H O LY
Leaves tumble, then rest in the ditch of writing, carrying the flower of melancholy
before speech becomes echoes
copulating among the rinds of the dark.
Leaves wander and roll about seeking a land of enchantment, forest after forest,
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S E A S O N O F T E A R S
(a poem in the voice of Abdulrahman al-Dakhil, falcon of Quraish) 1
It falls quiet, the call of the wilderness. Clouds traipse above the palms and from the edge of the groves the towers are tinted rose. It falls quiet, the call of return.
I ask her, and Damascus does not answer does not come to the stranger's aid.
Will he stop here if he passes by? He died without a sound. Without a secret to his name.
I live where she sleeps, among her long exhales in the weeping fields
in the bed spread by her tears in the small hallway
between her eyelids and sky. It falls quiet, the call of return. Of my life, nothing remains in my eye except these sad ghosts.
Still the trees that weep on the city's ground are lovers who sing my songs.
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Mirror of endless wandering, change the face of the moon,
for my beloved's face is no longer there. Yesterday, we climbed toward that star, saw him in the nude,
saw him clothed
and what we saw struck us a face made of dirt.
Change the face of the moon, now that her face is no longer there, 0 mirror of endless loss.
It falls quiet, the call of return.
I walk and the Euphrates alongside me walks, the trees follow like flags
and a pair of eyes from the embers of years. I sway with the swaying waist of the beast. I dance with a black star.
And the towers
are melodies displaced from their scores.
My body and its captors are in one land, my heart and its owners elsewhere.
68 Migrations and Transfonnations in the Regions of Night and Day
It fails the quiet, the song of return and the towers are a country of tears.
If she'd only known, she'd have wept the Euphrates and its banks of palms.
It fails quiet, the song of return.
Confused, confused, I own a choked language that raves, towers I own confused, crucifying day, tempted by a terror in its depth, tempted to rage confused, the shores rob my inheritance, the waves defend my dawn,
I sang of gardens and a towering palace while in wretchedness, in attics hid. Tell him who used to sleep on soft cushions that the heights are being punished by a star. Tell him to ride through the specter of hardship or he'll become the lowest of men.
It fails quiet, the song of return.
Wronging myself, I roil my history, slit its throat in my hand, rouse it back to life.
I shepherd my eras, torture my mornings. I feed them night, and feed them mirage. I have a shadow that fiils my earth
and lengthens. It sees, and greens, it burns its past and like me,
Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day 69
burns itself.
And we live together, walk together, the same green language on our lips.
And in the face of midmorning light and in the face of death
our ways part. It falls quiet, the song of return: I dream of Damascus,
of terror in the shadow of Qassiyun, a past era stripped of its eyes, of a calcified body, wordless tombs calling out, Damascus
die here and let your promises burn, calling out, Damascus, die and never return, you chased prey of fattened thighs,
woman offered to whomever comes your way, to chance, to a daring wayfarer,
sleeping through fever and through ease in the arms of the East.
I drew your eyes in my book. I carried you, a debt on my youth
in the greenness of Chota, 2 the foothills of Qassiyun, woman of mud and sin
temptress made of light. A city,
70 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day
Yesterday
poetry, daylight, and I reached Chota and stormed the gate of hope
howling at trees,
howling at water and fields
weaving out of them an army and a flag to raid your black sky,
and Damascus, our hands continue to weave. Nothing, not even death, can dissuade us. When will we die, Damascus,
when will we find ease?
And last night, in dream, Damascus, I shaped a statue of clay.
In his white curves I planted your history, Damascus, and I began in terror and in joy to fall like a quake
on the hill ofJ illiq. 3
I embraced her, stroked her and sang mmm mmm crescent moon.
And I said, No, you'll remain in longing, Damascus in my blood,
and I said, let Damascus burn, and my murdered depths arose calling out to Damascus, their frightened cries.
Migrations and Transfonnations in the Regions of Night and Day 71
Woman of disobedience, without certainty, woman of acquiescence,
woman of hubbub and shock,
woman of veins filled with forests and swamp, naked woman lost to her thighs
listening to the dead, to graves, to dens, listening with pious ears,
in love with your yellow corpses, your victims feeding on mud and tears.
City all eaten up, Damascus, feeding on skin and hide.
O love . . . No,
0 Damascus if it were not for you
I would not have fallen into these gorges, would not have torn down these walls would not have known this fire that calls out, that thuds our history and illuminates, vessel of the world coming our way. Pardon me, Damascus,
T R E E
The hungry plant a forest for hope.
The sound of weeping rises
to the trees, and the branches become a country for pregnant women, a country for harvest.
Each branch is a fetus that sleeps on a bed in the air green, calling out enchanting cries that had escaped the forest of ash and the towers of catastrophe, carrying the hungry's groans seeking nature's sustenance.
T R E E
Every day
behind the chapels, a child dies planting his face in corners,
a ghost before whom houses run fleeing. Every day
a sad apparition arrives from a grave
returning from the farthest reaches to a land of bitterness. He visits the city, its squares and lounges
melting like lead. Every day
from poverty, the ghost of the hungry arrives, on her face a sign:
a flower or a dove.
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T R E E
He does not know how to beautify
swords with severed limbs. He does not know how to make
his canines shine and glare. They come after him from a river of skulls and blood and they climb the short wall
and he is behind the door
(he dreams of remaining like a child behind the door) reading the last book of the starved.
T R E E
I told you: Wake up! I saw water as a child shepherding wind and stone. And I said: Under the water and fruit, under the surface of wheat grains there is a whispering that dreams of being a song for the wound
in the dominion of hunger and weeping . . .
Wake up, I call out to you. Don't you recognize the voice? I am your brother, al-Khidr.�
Saddle up the mare of death, tear time's door off its frame.
T R E E
I have not carried a spear, or gored a head,
and in summer, and in winter I migrate like a sparrow
into the river of hunger, into its magical watershed. My kingdom wears the face of water.
I rule absence.
I rule in surprise and pain, in clear skies and in storm.
No difference if l come near or move away. My kingdom is in light
T R E E
In Jeirun5 there is a door made of roses. Passersby bathe in its scent.
There is a tent for wounds, there is a forest for the morning, its branches are bridges that eyes track toward the wind's ferry
leading to another morning.
Nights are houses where the tired rest. They spike their flutes and read the books of water and dust. They turn their trusted tears into beads and laurel garlands,
necklaces, and a wound of roses in whose streams passersby bathe.
T R E E
He was wrapped with basil leaves,
with transparent angst and a clear conscience, wrapped in silence
and a luminous tearing. It was said that after the grave
he split open the grave, tossed h is death and flew searching for motherhood
on the earth of man.
And it was said his wife was poor. Here behind that tiny h ill, pregnant
and in between day and night in silence
in luminous tearing