ditch,

Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-Lebanese poet and author of a new book of original sayings, Signposts to Elsewhere, ( www.janestreet.org/press ) which has been quoted widely in such US publications as The Week Magazine, The New York Observer and Sun Sentinel. The book was also featured as a Book of the Year in The Independent, UK, 2008; as well as in the Year in Books, Sun Sentinel, USA for 2007.

He is the only contemporary Arab author to be included in the acclaimed encyclopedia of The World's Great Aphorists - a compendium of wit and wisdom, by James Geary (2007).
 
Yahia Lababidi’s poems and essays have appeared in Cimarron Revue, Leviathan: journal of Melville studies, Mizna, Stranger at Home: Anthology, Dream Catcher, Orbis, and Other Poetry.

You again

You again, of the singing wound

here again, lost and found and lost

trafficking in metaphysics and eternity

as the nearest hopes

where to, pilgrim

outdistancing chasms

rationing emotions

seeking sustenance

for the self too subtle and proud

for words

nocturnal flower, nurtured solitude

watered night

there you go, restraining the impulse

to say it all at once

even surrounded by silence

still filled with noise

now, having stirred some thrumming

hour when the moon throws

her full-bodied light

over all, like a silver screen night

of silent films, the whirring

of the reel. 

dawning

There are hours when every thing creaks

when chairs stretch their arms, tables their legs

and closets crack their backs, incautiously

Fed up with the polite fantasy

of having to stay in one place

and stick to their stations

Humans too, at work, or in love

know such aches and growing pains

when inner furnishings defiantly shift

As decisively, and imperceptibly, as a continent

some thing will stretch, croak or come undone

so that everything else must  be reconsidered

One restless dawn, unable to suppress the itch

of wanderlust, with a heavy door left ajar

semi-deliberately, and a new light teasing in

Some piece of immobility will finally quit

suddenly nimble on wooden limbs

as fast as a horse, fleeing the stable.

In Memoriam

He preferred muted suits:

prison grey, mousey brown

before the death sentence

But illness changed his tastes

as though, dipped in terror,

he somehow acquired color

Blossomed in riotous patterns

sporting vests that grew bolder

as did the stomach cancer

The stealthy advance of blackness

brought forth a gleaming will  

the bodily treachery, more trust

And that sweetly spirited protest

meant he smiled more, and softer

opening up as his body shut down

This was his last, graceful stand

emaciated and wasting away

in some way, to give style to death.

 I saw my face

I saw my face this morning

hovering at the base

of a coffee cup

eyes liquid black

and thirsting

lips parted as if

some great spoon

had stirred me to the depths

and left everything, swirling.

What do animals dream?

Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams

unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial?

Do they struggle to catch in their slumber

what is too slippery for the fingers of day?

Are there subtle nocturnal intimations

to illuminate their undreaming hours?

Are they haunted by specters of regret

do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?

Or are they revisited by their crimes

transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?

Do they retrace the outline of their wounds

or dream of transformation, instead?

Do they tug at obstinate knots

of inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?

Are there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies

against their perceived selves or fate?

Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar

to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?

Are they ever neither animal nor human

but creature and Being?

Do they have holy moments of understanding

in the very essence of their entity?

Do they experience their existence more fully

relieved of the burden of wakefulness?

Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream?

Or is it merely a small dying

a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?

The Art of Storm-riding

I could not decipher the living riddle of my body

put it to sleep when it hungered, and overfed it

when time came to dream

I nearly choked on the forked tongue of my spirit

between the real and the ideal, rejecting the one

and rejected by the other

I still have not mastered that art of storm-riding

without ears to apprehend howling winds

or eyes for rolling waves

Always the weather catches me unawares, baffled

by maps, compass, stars and the entire apparatus

of bearings or warning signals

Clutching at driftwood, eyes screwed shut, I tremble

hoping the unhinged night will pass and I remember

how once I shielded my flame.

If

If there were more than one of me

I’d shave my head and grow my beard

I’d be a Doctor of Theology

In great coat of myth, impermeable to ridicule

I’d raise my voice and sing

hymns to the Unknown god

Another me would come undone voluptuously

submit to possessions, deliriously

mate with night in vicious delight

I would be, in a word, unspeakable

indulge an appetite artistically criminal

gloriously indifferent to utter:  ruin!

Yet another me might take to the stage

part animal, part angel in improbable outfits

strike ecstatic poses, fuse with masses

Or perhaps, at last, renounce words and self

occupy an eye, to better see

in silent awe, peripherally

But, there is only this ambitious pen, and playpen

fencing a mass of miscarriages

trembling from time in unquiet blood

And I, with reluctant fidelity, am guardian

Looking over the restless, violent lot

for fear of fratricide.