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. 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.