I Do Not Bend
I am fire
Part of me fuels other parts
My glory is a challenge
I spent most of my life,
holding my soul hostage
within my soul
I appeared and my paths appeared on me
I banned all the roads
I step towards love, from which I never heal
I secretly married the expanse
but the sea declared me
a wave on the side of this maze
I submitted myself to pinnacles
The climb to my abysses crowned me
Sorrows of a god
I do not belong to my blind age
I have in the coming of time
a thousand goings towards me
With my doubt I made a shoe
With the torment of time, a glove
And to you, my language,
I assigned my coming exile
I do not bend
My jars are full and attainable
but I tend to distance them
The branches of the heart are wide and spread
No saddle can uphold my travel
Bright is the melancholy uniting my contradictions
The soul makes the body noisy
I bathe in my secret
I desecrate the part sparingly
I give - All is part of me -
I seize - My other part is destruction -
My veil lacks illusion
My honesty makes the unveiling radiant
I do not bend
Fulfilled with altitude
Tainted with impossibility
I resist the era of apes - my epoch -
To pour my shattering
I need the warmth of legends
The metamorphoses of elements
The light of the heart!
So obscure are you
The one vowing to erode my darkness
The absent in my retirements
To the point of extreme presence
The one consuming me - The me in him -
Will you be?!
Let my straying joy be in you
As we come
Love comes to us fluently
Invading
Like the pioneers
Love is ink
And the wounds battering in us, the cure
I preserve the alphabet
I identify in it
And it betrays me!
Is it my fault I had a vision?
Is foresight my curse?
Or am I blamed for my fidelity?
I am the resisting transparency - The merciful straying -
The key to my life is aversion
And what my stabbers oversee
Of my bleeding
I do not bend
I choose for my doubt the features of a time
That favored me with orphanage to the point of uniquity
I became for my affliction the melody and the string
Am I for this time but the glory of shining?
I breathe memory
I offer my sap to the coming of time
I am every morning's double
But why do you attach to my word
You, collars of my night
I do not care!
I excel in grace at the fore
I do not recoil
I do not hide
I do not descend
except if my desire flows upward
I do not bend
Between you and me stands an abyss you saluted
with the past
The future is vowed to the call of a flow
that founds our deepness
You are my partner in the excessive beat
The last of songs
The first of all breeding astonishment
in the folds of my visions
And the whitest wisps of your steps
are my own
I transpired through you
Until the braising coal became translucent
Desire reincarnated
The rock raged
Umbrage me, I shadow you with the sky
of my exhaling secrets
Let us seal each other with the fervor of a question
As wings and dimensions...
I do not bend
Cloudy with your prayers
I threaten the fields of your future
My sanctuary bursts into fertility
And my future is fugitive birds
migrating to you
Beautiful is the joy we perpetrate
Blissful is being what never happens
Glorious is the soaking of the flow of existence
with your flamboyant moments
Poetry vows to celebrate
your love
You, chivalrous to the extreme
Distracted from all but myself
Deep in my sacred parts
to the limits of seduction
You, secret language
With you, never ... will I bend!
Ouafaa Lamrani
Cabo Negro, August 1995
(Translated from arabic by Abdelmalek Kemmou)
Birth sign: Aquarius
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