Revenge by Salim Barakat

Revenge

 

a.

The coats are all there,

the winds all there,

footprints deep in the snow all there,

the lamps, houses, last apparitions, all there.

So gather in your tame hands all that they can hold of perfection

and strive so that the scene may be a tamed echo.

 

b.

An unease, like morning, preoccupies those approaching my end, and I — struggling under a great net — hang place — like a prisoner’s pants — on the line, that delicate line, running from the origin of comedy to your moaning.

 

c.

The abundance of naught is I and will is my suspicion.

 

d.

Rage is the sign of night and water a thought ahead of its own completion.

 

e.

Like a shoe polished,

like a nickel doorknob,

thus is your scream.

 

Vocabulary:

 

Day: anger masked in air

Wind: the steps of a word toward its secret

Sound: the ruin of form

Longing: gold scattered on the velvet of the end

Space: the shaper of light

Nothingness: the humor of shadows languishing in their seats

Writing: violence testing the forgotten

Number: the yield of futility

Fruit: the tree’s proof of a past that eludes all proofs

Mask: the moaning of the manifest

Distance: repeated panting

Certainty: a murmuring on the other side

Resurrection: a childhood confirming reason

Gold: a bar fight

Life: a golden bullet

As for you, dweller in endings, don’t wander too long, lest dinner get cold.

 

(translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen)