Stone

No one knows stone like me.
I seeded it in the fetus of the mountain,
and I reared it on blossoms of metal.
It grew like a walking child
and I followed in its footsteps.
Its silence is a listening heart
and its solitude is an alphabet that teaches speech,
a burnishing that suffices for treasures,
and imprints itself on books and mirrors.
I read in it the glass of paradise, and the amulets of passion.
It rises lightly, and offers the wind the company of books,
like me.

Solitary, and a companion to strangers.
Its water is the wakefulness of pinnacles.
It guards the sleep of trees, and bends.
At every slope it has an envoy washed by snow,
that it takes from the sea the messages of the waves.
With eyes that exude yearning in a stranger's childhood,
and chased like a tiger swinging in nets that dangle about me,
it listens to the pulse in arteries.
It glows and lusts, roves
and raves,
like me.
It knows secrets and scandals,
is well-versed in the unseen
The rose takes from it its purpose,
and it gazes from the mountain
as the sky discloses and dissolves it shapes.

Like me
its names are in metals
and in the adversary's alibi.
Like me,
a lover melting, its water is anxiety and the paradise of loss.
It endures love
and is filled with travel and desire for ecstasy,
like me.
It alone knows the history of my steps and my errors.
It forgives and forgets like me.

****

Body


I saw you in a body where stallions moan
and from whose arms storms emerge.
Abandoned to sighs
trampled by fillies with the whinnying of desire
and the infatuations of mating,
words issued from you like a reed tucked
between sadness and steel.

I saw you among a murdered race
storming with fire and broken glass.
A body raving with love,
a soul neglected by death.

© Qassim Haddad
Translated by Khaled Mattawa

Qassim Haddad (b. 1948), is a Bahraini poet and one of the foremost modernist poets of the Peninsula. Born in Bahrain, he is largely self-educated and has been able to transcend his lack of formal higher education through his own erudition and fine literary sensibility. A prolific poet, his poetry developed with the years to arrive at an authentic modernist outlook and style, achieving at times a rare beauty and sophistication. He started publishing his poems in the mid-sixties. Qassim Haddad is also a founding member of the "Bahrain Writers and Literators Association, established in 1969 and editor of the editorial committee of "Kalemat", a literary magazine, published by the Bahrain Writers and Literators Association. He is also a honour member of the Jordanian Writers Union. His first collection was The Good Omen (1970), followed by several others among which are The Heart of Love (1980); Doomsday (1980); Resurrection (1982), Relatings (1982), Belonging (1982) and Shrapnel (1983), Walking Guarded with Ibexes (1986). He took part in various Arab symposia and poetry meetings. Qassim Haddad is also involved in theatre, being a member of the "Awal Theatre". He published a large number of critical studies in Arab Newspapers and periodicals. His poetry has been published in English, German and French.