Sleeping Baal

A. Z. FOREMAN is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Italian, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Welsh have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. These poems were written during an archaeological survey for Old Arabic inscriptions in the Jordanian Harrah

The rain-torrents have turned old ruins up

like writings re-incised by their old pens…

…I stopped to question them. But how to question

immutably mute stones that speak no sense?

وجلا السيول عن الطلول كانها    زبر تجد متونها اقلامها

فوقفت اسألها وكيف سؤالنا     صما خوالد ما يبين كلامها

               — from a Jāhilī  poem attributed to Labīd bin Rabī’ah

            1. Arriving in Amman

With speakers’ call to prayer, a minaret

hails me synthetic welcome. Radios.

Shawarma. Shisha. Soon the body glows

with a heat dryer than the brow is wet.


Twelve greetings later, on a car-loud street

pink with the ancient sun about to set,

the mind is red for something waiting yet

out there, where time still goes on deathless feet


in sand, on black torched rocks no hand has scratched

since Rome made war, where other Arabs spread

tears for a drought, a beast, a man outmatched,

or scraped song shards:

                                    Mot feasts. Brute death eats yet.       

The interchange of night and day is set.                               

Baal sleeps. He only sleeps. He is not dead[1].                        

            2. Into the Harrah

We wake into black morning, race the dawn

down Baghdad highway with the Bedouin,

riding no camels now but a Nissan,

to meet the leavings of their ancient kin


wheeling through stonelands down a knotting route

whose winds like secrets only one man tells

blow ears hot, till dark rocks force us on foot

to enter the most beautiful of hells


where, hard up a stone-scaled, day-blasted hill

I climb and clasp my way in sweat until

we reach the written vestige of a man

that has outfaced the centuries’ churning reigns

before my feet:           “by Māsek ben Sahrān,         

The year he rose and shattered Caesar’s chains”     

            3. Desert Remembrance at Noon

Stop and let us weep in memory

— from a Jāhilī poem attributed to Imru’-l-Qays

This is where brutal things are beautiful.

Almighty silence, stone and sun command

everything. Nothing living here can stand

alone. Alone is slow death as a fool.


You must foot up these rocks where visions bend

in air throbbed like a feverish head, and jewel

yourself with grit-toned sweat to comprehend

water’s real taste.

                                    This earth was great and cruel


to men who wrought and died and somehow thrived

at dice with Shahs and Caesars. The austere

received them like a palace. Their inscribed

names still immune to deadly heavens out here

on letter-chumbled stone call back in me:


Stop here and weep with us in memory

            4. The Last Ride of Ghayyār-el

By Ghayyār-el ben Ghawth of the line of Hathāy when he rode from his folk

      He camps for war

            So be his final campment here today

      Fame for him is first

            So be his final campment here today

      He suffers who returns

            So be his final campment here today

He has gone to the outlands to stay in the heath and watch for his uncle Sakrān..


               — inscription from Marabb al-Shurafā’


            Too long he’s waited for Sakrān out here

with the clan’s camp. The raid should have been done

before that barrow’s shadow was even near

darkening up his tent. But now the sun

            unslowable by gods or jinns or men

reddens down till the desert seems to burn

cold at his prayer: Allāt let him return.


So, saddling up, he camels out again


for outlands. The carved words he leaves behind

shrill on a stone that heavied a god’s mind

survive the night and more. He camps for war.

So be his final campment here today.

He suffers who returns.

                                                An arrow tore

the kid’s skull. Old Sakrān was on his way.

            5. Sā’ed Avenged

By Sā’ed son of Mar’ son of Nūr. He grieved for his brother Nūr whom the Nabataeans killed when he was pasturing the livestock of the tribes of Awīdh and Thlayp, so O Allāt of Oman and goddess of Dathan and Gadd of Awīdh and Gadd of Thlayp, let him have revenge against him that did this.

               — Inscription C 2445


            The night went long on Sā’ed down the plain,

eyes pricked by ceaseless stars. Cuff eyes that weep

at rock and tentmark. Time had come to keep

the vow. Make Raqmo bleed. Nūr had been slain

               by the town-squatters cowering again

behind their king and walls. So charged the owl

loud on the cairn with carnage in its howl:

Your arrows on Nabato for your pain!


He and the heart were up. Thlayp and Awīdh

were at his back as day began to breathe,

like a hot godhead ready to speak flame


inhaling brief cool. The damned convoy came

from Raqmo’s gate. Bows ended five. Eight others

bleeding alive.

                        And all thirteen had brothers.

            6. Return to Amman, feeling ill from a burger

Considering how natural men survive

with man and nature both as enemies

when honor is the balm to keep alive

with violence pandemic like disease,


where empire is an organ of the fates

that shape your tribe as surely as the sun

kills and revives land,             I, a child of states,

recall, tonight in New Rabbath Ammon[2],


the stones man-worked and heaved for a dead woman

beside a wadi. There no practical

mind-skidding struggle could repress the human

rite of a megalithic funeral


against a godless world their gods redeem.

Baal sleeps. I am awake to hear him dream.

بلينا وما تبلى النجوم الطوالع        وتبقى الجبال بعدنا والمصانع

                                             We perish and rot  

                                               but the rising stars do not.

                                              When we are gone,

                                                the hills and stoneworks stay.

                                                            —  Labīd bin Rabī’a


[1]                  A paraphrase of North Arabian inscription KRS 2453, a good candidate for the earliest recorded piece of Arabic poetry. Based on decipherment by Al-Jallad.

[2]                  “Rabbath Ammon”, the Biblical name for the Ammonite capital located on the same site as the modern city of Amman

A Ninth Century Winter Poem – from Old Irish

A. Z. FOREMAN is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, OldIrish, Italian, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Welsh have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.

A Ninth Century Winter Poem

From Old Irish

Here’s my song.   Sad stags moan.

Winter blows,   summer’s gone.


High winds lash.    Low, the sun.

Short, its course.   Seas roar on.


Fall-red fern   loses form.

Wildgeese wail   as the norm.


Cold now holds   each bird’s wing.

Icy times.   So I sing.

Dice From There: A Pair for Mahmoud Darwish

A Z FOREMAN is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Italian, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Welsh have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.

Dice From There: A Pair for Mahmoud Darwish

            From There

It was Mahmoud, of all who sing and die,

Born in a nation’s catastrophic dawn,

Who made a country look him in the eye.

He made me listen to him in Silwan

That day. I stank of grief and sweat and fear

Watching the men break down an old man’s door

And son. I vomited. He tugged my ear

To tell me he had lived through this but more.

Through gas-grenades and prison and despair,

A people clutched at heart, to a death of one,

Under the sign of sacred dignity

He knew his Exodus. He came from there

To forge himself to song between the gun

And Rita. Anguish and humanity.

            Who am I to say

Could he have been my friend, whose flowers weighed

Down on the gunsight’s scales? I think. We both

Learned home in strangeness. Both our girlfriends made

Love in a language we refused to loathe.

Seeing him weary of the slow gun-play

Of sloganing, outgrow the lollipop

Of rhetoric and learn that where words stop

Could carry more than what we have to say,

I think how his verse plays in later years

At dice with histories he cannot master,

The struggle for a thing he vaguely fears,

Chased by the angry twilight of disaster

Across the longitudes from Galilee

To Texas. Anguish and humanity.