Abstract
This time sequence opens with a soliloquy, or more precisely, a submission to time, in the form of personal lamentations, and is followed by irregular stanzas spanning unidentified episodes of journeying, the intention to do so, or total stasis. Throughout, time is continuously prodded by the intimate journey within one’s own time, by its linguistic and haptic promise, through the name and naming, the names passed on from parents to their child. In this sense, the poem queries the inward pact signed in journeying, between the son on the one hand, and the father and mother on the other, constituting the announcement of history through intersecting times of refugeeness, but equally in the context of humanity and inhumanity as a whole. As time is incessantly probed in this poem, so is journeying within it. In particular, time, as it branches out onto subjective (and non-subjective) times, is conveyed initially through the journeying from I/We to They in the poem, ushering in competing pronouns in an attempt to blur time itself and those inside and outside it. The premise of this poem, or body of poems, is not in any way to locate time with precision, physically or historically, but to repeat a question which seldom finds a place and time; that is, “where is time” to witness the future?
A Soliloquy before Time
- I tremble. The hand in the hand, smothered, breathless, air in between.
- I tremble. My body is a garment hewn from cut-out fabric cast on the road, never a coincidence, an offer for the coming tense.
- Who is it, the one, the only one to see the road amidst severed faces on unknown bodies?
- The journey, what is it? A desolate land, a roaring sea, a name of names?
- There is nowhere for me. There I killed my father to steal the name, to sail towards the wildest of screams and never return?
- My name, they say, is that of a prophet, and my mother’s, the silent hand on my shoulder, is holy wood for coffins and ships.
- I tremble in the name of the name as I see my eyes trespassing in every void and flesh.
- I see them in every road, skinned limbs, a dialect gasping for sense and air.
- We walk, so we think, never in the absolute presence of one another, breathing the blindman’s stick.
- We walk with feet as heavy as fate, as light as bodies not remembering their bodies.
- Each a petrified soul. Each a time.
Time
- I
- The secret
- Creaking of hips while journeying
- Faces of sand wrapped in thick cloaks
- Dates from the Hereafter sealed in the far end of fruit
- A glimpse of something
- A blink of an eye
- Then resurrection
- Things they see with their eyes shut
- Things they may recognise with their senses and
- Edges
- The severity of sleep
- As they hallucinate
- Then an awakening
- It is the time of the tree of the unexpected
- Befalling them
- Stomping on arid routes like a raging beast
- Ravaging the thing guarding all things
- In a pale of doubts and amulets
- It is far
- Farther than the stitch of sound to itself
- Is it not, then, the creation of farness?
- II
- They come
- Laps devoid of night
- (Perhaps time was absent or
- Perhaps it was them in their unworn bodies)
- They come or so they say
- (When they sought what they desired
- When they prodded their shadows to follow them)
- They come in seconds
- In a time saturated with clarity—a clear time
- Now they have come
- Let us invite them over
- If they agree
- We shall walk behind them
- Towards their promised cheerfulness and
- Land
- III
- A secret concealing nothing save the time of the road
- They walk on a thread of dust
- Or water
- So as not to forget their intentions in the air
- Another secret, it is
- Or
- Digging
- Ploughing
- Shoving
- Not finding…
- A sighting without a mirror
- Urns of fresh metal and
- Time
- A voice withers in throats of flesh and
- Dies
- Time’s secret is screaming
- Calling
- So hasten the slaughter
- Hasten it, O stranger
- Time is a feast
- Feast’s a sound hovering in sound
- In the sublimity of sound
- IV
- They say:
- We will be just like tomorrow
- A river
- A just river
- In the beginning, as in the end, water
- The river we cross with scale
- And memory
- (Silent was the time then)
- Hands ominously gesturing at the symbol and
- Nothing
- (One nothing)
- We shall lend the touch its touch again
- The time to the kingdom of the thing
- The White Ghoul?
- The plain under the river?
- Where is the river?
- Where is it
- Where is the water’s witch and
- The followers of water?
- V
- Sounds fall deep in the belly
- A hole in the belly
- Wreathed by the sun’s orbits
- The moon as it is, motionless as though devoured
- Eyes growing rounder until they see another moon
- A moon
- The shape of a bead on a stranger’s forehead
- Sounds fall
- They rattle in the belly
- Time weds the stranger’s intentions and
- Leaves
- VI
- They sit with incomplete books and psalms
- With a grip of what they do not know
- With an amulet the shape of a place
- These are similar-different things
- Mysteries in the clarity of mind
- Clear, sometimes, in their absence
- They say:
- Clear, do not be
- Nor be time by the sword
- A heart is for the stranger
- God, find time, never find it
- Drag it in full time
- If You enter
- VII
- When will they come those strangers?
- To write their return to nothing from nothing
- From dusty borders and
- Crushed wheat
- From yesterday
- From their broken veins
- When will some of this happen?
- Will they return for their
- Crops
- From the faces that remained
- From their still faces
- Where is the place?
- Where is time?
- VIII
- Where is time?
- And what happened to the wind to take them with her
- Where is time at this time?
- When it remains
- When it dies
- When it does not return even after a while
- Listen
- (They listen)
- Listen to what is coming
- Beyond what is called silence
- Listen
- (They listen)
- Let time go back to where it was
- The journey shall begin
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Acknowledgments
These poems were originally commissioned by Christopher Kent and Gamal Khamis for their narrative recital, Odyssey—Words and Music of Finding Home.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
© 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).