Lightness

This is a new, weird stage for me. Lightness: the flowers are not as heavy as before. I don’t see “lo más alla” in the evening walks. I see what I see. A swift, brisk, breeze, a dog and a man walking his dog. There are no attempts to imagine what would have happened if the leash gets tangled in the bush, nor if the man who walks the dog turns out to be prince charming. There’s the moment and there’s the breeze announcing its passing and ensuing defeat. There’s nothing beyond the horizon nor between the tufts of sun rays. I watch the waves and they’re waves! I am bothered by this- they should be a cascade of remote longings at a howling night, they must be a metaphor for the persistence of injustice in my land. I don’t want to talk about my land- khalas, I’m sick of being morbid and lamenting the lost glory on the heaps of debris. And yet I am still bothered by the fact that waves are waves. My unbridled mind imagines them as pebbles in a country road leading to an empty house, and as the black car drives into the yard, the pebbles make this constant sound. As soon as I close my eyes the waves morph into an infinity of corrugated, colorful roofs in Aida’s refugee camp on a rainy December day. I watch them closely and I realise that all the drawings that I made of this piece of reality are flimsy. 

The unbecoming of the poet is a process of jettisoning dry and old layers of the obligation to see the sublime beneath everything: the skies, the waves, the land and everything in between.