Am I Dying or Living: Miosaics
This poem is dedicated to Syria, for Syria will rise again
I wrote most of this poem some years back. It was then that I started to write long poems in the narrative style, but poems being a different genre from that of a story or narrative refuse to be shackled by time sequence, a plot, or progression and unraveling. They have another logic or, let us say, form of communication which dispenses with all that makes a story a story. Poems are moments of illumination that shoot through our awareness like meteors and speak to us with the tongue of vision.
I grew up in a world always on the edge, always threatened to be dragged into the abyss. The Palestinian tragedy haunted me like it haunted every one in the Arab world. It was as if I always knew that one day I had to face the terrible tragedy of war , the horror of the death of so many and resolve it. When I was twenty two years old I wrote a play predicting my future, as the dreamy girl-heroine of the play faces the issue of war and destruction, pitting the dream of beauty and peace against harrowing suffering. She could not resolve the issue of violence and paid for it with her life. When I was thirty one, while I was writing my theses in Swansea Wales, I returned to the subject in a long poem I named: Am I Living or Dying? Only by then, I had acquired a historical perspective. The world I originally came from is an old world which gave birth to and witnessed the first civilizations of mankind. That world of my origin died several times and was reborn several times. Past and present in that world are sometimes interchangeable, so that if you are a person of vision you become aware of the endless recurrence of a pattern rising and falling like the waves of the sea: one civilization rising and another falling; with life renewing itself and death surrendering to life. You acquire a prophetic soul and write like a Cassandra or a Sybil.
When I rewrote parts of my poem again in the wake of the Syrian Revolution, I understood why I did no try to publish the poem until now because now is the right time for it. The way I see it, is that while we are dying, we are also living in memory, in time past and present and preparing to live in time future The death of the Syrians in multitudes remains the central spiritual question that I have to unravel or at least live with. We have to live their deaths and die their lives even as they die, but we have also to carry them and ourselves into the future.This can only done by giving life the last word, but life without love to seal it and hold it together is empty and hollow.
I have given my poem the subtitle: Mosaics, because it is composed of little windows opening on different disparate experiences juxtaposed and assembled together in order to carry the poem to its final destination: rebirth and life renewed. The poem lingers at every illuminated window to assign to it its special space in the illuminated whole.
- Am I Living or Dying , etching
1
The light was dim
But their eyes unflinchingly burnt,
I ran in terror,
But unmoistened and hard
Their cold cold eyes
Cruelly set like ice
Watched my falling hair
Watched my falling steps.
I fear your children God:
They tread heavily
And the incessant feet
Lay bare my soul.
High the vultures perched and eyed,
Fierce eyes that never blink are evil
No air or light
Can carry that might
Heaped in voluptuous heaviness
Under a wing
That droops in stillness
Yet would suddenly fling
And whip and smite.
Music of smoke
Of songs breaking
Of words cracking,
They made rhymes out of the dust;
We moved our lips to sing
But as they parted
Our songs dropped and fell
Like dry trampled leaves.
Our child is crying
The music is dying.
2
The vast deluge of profane time
Surged and charged
Inscribing the tablets of the cities of the dying
The horizons collapsed
But the cities of death yawned and gaped
Roamed by the angel of death
Caring nothing for the dying and the dead.
Stay your wrath death
I recall and I remember
That rhythm of the fountain
In the walled hidden garden
That whispering measure of the lute
Rising and falling
What have they done to the jasmine?
What have you done to the children?
I recall and remember.
3
Over the Syrian sea hovered
The dreams of bygone kingdoms,
Only, the pines the cypresses the oaks
Remembering.
My mother held an olive branch,
My mother said,
Look where the horizons bend gently
To lie among the anemones.
Mother, the City of the dead is yelling
The men and women are in the streets dying
They have nailed them laughing
Until the crosses crouched in exhaustion
And they died kneeling.
I fear thy children God.
4
I gazed at a rock
I gazed at a rose
I knew not
Which was the rose
And which was the rock
Then it seemed to me
That I was the rose
That I was the rock
5
In the weeping crowds
I moved like a ghost
My hair torn
My eyes raw,
Come to me my child,
O mother
This pain is terrible to bear
I cannot see
Do not forsake me
I can never come to thee
6
In the looking glass
I saw my staring image
And shivered to think
That I shall have to kneel
And clean the streets
With my trembling hair
For unto us a child shall be born
Today tomorrow or in a while
7
Cities crackling baking raging
Into the nights of nothingness
Into the torched dawns of annihilation
Proclaiming the time of the beast
Announcing the apocalypse
The undoing of ten thousand years of civilization
8
I shall stand between you and your fear
Look into my eyes
For you I shall nurse the night
And cry not when the might
Of the manmade evil nails me
To fallen walls and fallen homes
Choking with the thick smoke
That heaves and gasps
With the cries of the dying
9
Let us walk in unison
Step falling into step
Shadow merging into shadow.
10
There was a time when we looked without fear
We didn’t have a memory then
We had no past
Ours was the first kiss
The first embrace
The first cry of tenderness
Hold me tightly
They were not there to destroy
And annihilate.
11
Why should I know
Take this knowledge away
And throw it to the swine-
But I recall and remember
I remember what you said mother
Once you are born you are born for ever
Once you are born to die
You inherit all the knowledge of the dead.
Why should I suffer?
When they kill a child I die
Why?
Because you are the child
Only God can be without beings.
12
Am I living or dying
My mother had many children
Who is not a child of my mother?
She raised us in the gardens
And sang to us at nightfall
That was God the mother
God the mother rocked thousand cradles
In the desert
We were fed on the light
That the stars shed at night
The sands kissed the feet
That shone so bright
Who can wean a child
That drank that delight?
God willed me a pool
I lay transparent in his thoughts
Dreaming of him concealed in the lotus
God willed me a tree
I rose and knew the sun
I embraced the storms
And whispered to the eagles
An oak is ancient and wise
God willed me a sea
I held the dolphins in my arms
As the sun then the moon then the stars
Sought to gaze at their beauty
In the mirror of my infinity
Before that was only the primordial mud
And hot formless void.
What was that condensed horror
That completed the circuit round the sun?
Am I living or dying?
13
Take this knowledge away
Of civilizations warring against civilizations
Of one terror impatient to devour another terror
Of living and dying
Nurturing and burying
Take that knowledge
Of time crouching on the floors of the oceans
Crystallized into lasting eloquence in the fossils.
I was there when the sea heaved
And littered the mountains with graves.
O mother, a Sybil is no woman
A Sybil is fire and air.
Creatures of time
Are denied the solace of time.
The slave of eternity
Can but stare at eternity.
I want this earth and the sound of water.
14
I wish to relive the moment that was lost
The lives that were never mine
I want the last garden
The one and only garden.
When the key unlocks the hidden gate
My heart will tremble
As I walk into that glory.
Behold the white dome
Rising through the mist
Into the loveliness of the arching sky.
The shadows will linger for a while
Then the light will unite
Shadow and pillar
In fountains of marble
Climbing from the ground
To expire in the dome..
In the temples of the desert
I saw you queens of bygone times
Kings of ancient kingdoms.
They stare hushed in the annals of light
While their rose-coloured hands
Rest on the wind as the wind passes by.
Gaze at us, eyes of stone
Hewed out of the night of the cock
Gaze at us and preach to our cities.
Masks of our ancient selves
Are you living or dying?
The tall window burnt
In the receding light
Like red rubies
Set in a crown of flames.
Darkness hushed under the ceilings
Stared at the distant hills
And the violet streams of lilac.
Under the olive trees
While the sun was sinking
I stretched my hand to the window
And yearned to plunge into that glory.
15
We moved our hands
Over the formless mud
Seething with a voiceless desire
For a faceless terror
Hunting for death in deformity
In the mighty chaos
Of a cold bloodless world.
We lingered to brood
Mother
We trembled as we lingered
To count and remember
Our losses
And our grace we saw
Trampled in the dust.
16
Do I know that
Darkness is unmoored
And is hoist
And is pitched
Unloosed
Raw and sealed
In the upper air
Do I know that
Night has perched
Laughing softly that
Night has arched
Chuckling softly that
Night has plunged
Ravishing the great dome?
But the night
Was not always the night
The father is history,
The mother the repository of civilization.
Keep me among the proud
Stain not my soul with meekness
Am I living or dying?
17
Cassandra, do not cry for fallen Troy
Perhaps all is a dream
The burning towers
The trampled dead
In the blazing streets.
Who can prevent one troy from falling
And another Troy from heroically rising?
Let us still our hearts.
Is Troy rising or falling
Am I living or dying?
18
When the rope tightens it snaps-
Am I Living or dying?
The wheels have turned a full circle
The pangs of death are but echoes
The pangs of birth are but a dream
I am wrapped in my stillness waiting
In the calm in the hush waiting
19
I am sleeping
Who touches me
These fingers are bright
Spelling violets
In the air.
Linger in my hair.
The sails are wings
Feathers in the winds.
In the fields under the trees
My child is walking
in loveliness
Wrapped in brightness.
My heart is beating beating
Am I living or dying.
20
- Am I living or Dying 3, etching
I am all bent upon myself
Curled
Like a knotted wave
Curved
Like a sea-swept cave.
Crouching listening
I hear the molten lava
The subterranean streams.
Bending brooding
I yield to the burning energy
The fierce pangs of pending birth.
I am close to the earth
I am close to you.
The rock-roses are breathing
Into my lungs.
My veins are drawing blood from
The red soil of drowsy elements
From murmuring roots,
The hair-tapestry of the living
Sporting with green death.
I am close to the earth
I am close to you.
Nestling
Struggling
Wrestling
With the fine veins
Of singing minerals,
The soft fibres of scented wood,
My body is shooting into the whining lava
Is sharing with the impatient talk
Of the burning mud
Down down down
Where all life awaits beneath
The brown crusts of crazy times.
I am close to the earth
I am close to you.
21
- I am the formless mud
Shape me
I am the breathless air
Breathe me
I am the sunless Seas
Light me
I am the word unsaid
Say me
I am the glory to be
Praise me
Make me your footfall
Dance me
Make me your music
Sing me
Make me your rock
Lean on me
Mix me with the earth
Saw me
Blend me with the seed
Root me
Make me your corn
Harvest me
Make me your wheat
Thrash me
Make me your flour
Knead me
Make me your bread
Make me your loaf
Break me
Make me your flesh
Make me your blood
Make me your breath
Live me
Die me
Make me your cradles
Make me your births
Rise me
22
Will the rose
Unfold for me
So that I might gaze
At the pool
At the still water
Spreading from eternity to time
From time to eternity?
23
Riders on the rocky road
Loosen the reigns
Spur the impatient steeds
Destiny awaits you in another time
Carry your fate as lightly as a feather
Carry this bitter inheritance
And flood the world with courage
The road stretches through death and sorrow
Then turns
Then who will not dream
Who will not be liberated?
“Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!” *
24
Sway and sing
Sing sing sing
Spread the sails
The sea is our cradle
The storm’s the calmness.
The rainbow wrings my heart
I rush to my mighty fall
All in all in all
In the wind in the well in the womb
I sway I swing
Am I living or dying?
©Alisar Iram
Revised and rewritten in parts,June 2013
* From the poem Under Ben Bulben by W.B.Yeats
alisariram 