Rasha Omran
Two Poems
[92]	A Place for Me, Perhaps
In the world, there is a place for a rebel like me a rented apartment in some country a narrow cellar, big enough for my suitcase a forgotten inn, unfrequented by those who belong
In the world, there is a place for an insubordinate such as me a street where the scent of jasmine lingers a sidewalk trodden by different steps or an abandoned door no one opens
In the world, there is a place for a dreamer just like me
a city, intimate with the sea every night
giving birth each morning to multi-coloured gulls
and at noon opening her legs to be impregnated by the sun
In the world, there is a place for an outcast I know friends colour the minutes with their greetings friends whose souls accommodate differences of opinion friends unbothered by the mud of old shoes on the carpet of their affection
There is a place in the world for an atheist who lives near me a compassionate face for a nearby sky angels who loan humans their peace and borrow anxiety in return
a lonesome, insomniac god who visits the earth in search of his woman
and finding her, sleeps in peace
There is a place in the world for a lover like me a man bursting from his composure, emerging naked as the wind to meet me
IJEMS
Rasha Omran
a mad man who always agrees with me when I say there is a
place in the world for her and me together I mean his wife or any woman who knows to forget her fingers
on his table just as I do a man seceding from his blackness, drawn to the pink colour [93]
on the shoes he buys for me a man who thinks in the abstract, knowing that love is outside
time and above space a man who resumes his poem in my body and who, when he
leaves me, takes from my skin some salt so I won't forget him one man only
There is a place in the world for an eternal woman like me an ancient oak that shades a tightly sealed room a room big enough for my body only when its waters dry up and a vast void, big enough perhaps for the flood of my soul.
Hallucination and Free-Flowing Blue Rivers
This place has no name
no clear features
no trace of a touch or a tread
only emptiness with its gigantic grip
dragging me to him
seating me exactly in the middle,
a conspicuous stone sitting in the dust
Like this he has
a wild darkness on his shoulders
cities rolling soundlessly off his voice
as he tossed something like solitude between his fingers
and for no reason he stared at me
like someone waiting for an inscrutable sign and when I signalled
he gathered in his fragmented parts, aggrandizing himself, and embraced me
VOLUME 4 | 2011 | SPECIAL ISSUE
Rasha Omran
I could not fathom what happened to me my body stretched itself like the whistle of a speeding train from my head, clouds escaped, gleaming like bubbles of light, and on my skin, circles of women grew by the thousand [94]	I could not fathom what happened to me
I hallucinated in words that woke year after year then I murmured the song of an ancient flute while he stared at me
letting his many fingers peel the rolling cities off his voice and put them in my mouth
There was something, then, that seduced me
into losing equilibrium
When his trembling touched me
I was nothing but a shadow revealing his blue riddles
and scattering them like free-flowing rivers
There was something on his shoulders that seduced me
abandoned thickets from a distant night,
birds improvising their rarity
spacious prairies with the last murmours of fragile echoes There were clouds, bolts of lightning and the illusion of
advancing winds There, my stags had to leap
with darkened eyes or with eyes from which glinted
ancient days There's no difference,
it's an open invitation to examine the strangeness or side with astonishment as it swings the heart as if to dancing music
But I, siding with myself,
concealed my features and bent down to
collect the memory of his fingers from my skin
He was the darkness of my kohl and I entered his proving
ground I exit to enter again then I exit and he enters me
IJEMS
Rasha Omran
then he exits and I enter him
then, with no resistance
I left the memory of his fingers on my skin
surrendering to the possibilities of delayed pleasure
while my body began to stretch	[95]
and stretch,
suddenly it was a tall tree. Translated by Khaled al-Masri
VOLUME 4 | 2011 | SPECIAL ISSUE