*
Alexandria
For Mohab Nasr
All these years my friend
As though we’re here by mistake
Waiting until the roads clear
To drive unlicensed trucks
And face the border guards
With forced laughter and cash.
We dream of places that were they found
We’d be no good for, my friend,
Forced to mix with the statues
To swap their talk with them
To be jammed in among them
With frozen limbs, looking and not seeing,
Our heads bowed down at home
We excuse ourselves from going to the quarries
That we might try reproducing in secret,
Mourning our endangered line.
All these years plucking up the courage
To declare we are not statues
And then collapse in pieces from their plinths,
Dead with flattened heads,
With eyes bulging out like mother-of-pearl,
With holes in our bones.
How is it, my friend, after all these years
All we can utter is croaking?
Trans. Qisasukhra
