These Apples Are Guilt Upon My Hand
A Disappearing Virtual Poetry (Micro)Chapbook
by El Habib Louai
The Cold Eye of the Border Man
For all the clandestine immigrants
It is dusk and the birds
have found their way home,
needless of a clock, map or sextant,
safe in their nests with a little brood
Things left behind
against circumstances are visualized
Voices resound in the convolutions of the brain
Curling to reach the ones who left
but they remind themselves of the chasm.
Now you are here
on the closest border
The border man will fix you
with the cold eye of a snake
and answer not a word
He will count you and give you a number
amongst the lucky ones
who left everything behind:
your scarves, robes,
dresses and makeup
your silver, gold and bills
your freshly cut flowers,
your porcelain pots and pets,
your peevish and discredited gods.
What good is your clinging to unforgotten beauty?
What about the kinsmen and the lost friends?
Your rigorous bonds of blood
with their cold stares and blank faces?
They left your realm with its mundane prerequisites
They are now forming rings and joining hands
in games neither you nor your enemies know.
You said goodbyes and parted ways
in your different modern-day Sinais
You left everything behind
except your ancestral nightmares
born of Manichean doctrines
The border man will fix you with a cold eye,
count you and give you a number
You are just now the only lucky one.
These Apples Are Guilt Upon my Hand
What ails me,
I could not know
These apples are guilt upon my hand
and if I go far enough
where shall I find a sacred place?
There isn’t any in a world forged by
Rivalries of rotten systems,
catastrophes of conquests
and lopsided peace
of “sharks versus minnows.”
For some to gain, others must lose
in the game of what is named civilization:
Egyptian, Akkadian, Assyrian,
Roman, Hellenic, Persian,
Turkic, Muslim Arab, Mughal, Mongol,
Chinese, Spanish, British,
Aztec, Inca, Maya, American and others
They all fed on and grew by slaughtering and subjugating
other peoples, tribes and city-states,
They claim they are in it for order, freedom and a truer faith.
Does the Anthropocene deserve extolment?
Next to the apple tree in the parched field
stands a Judas tree planted since eternity. I am not inciting you
to have any second thoughts or antagonize yourself
Knowledge, guilt and betrayal have been concomitant
with each other in the cradle of eternity.
Day after day, my horse gains more weight,
more extra biting flies as it tries to take more than its load
And here I find myself again among my people, the Amazigh people
or what is left of a decent tradition, a historical consciousness
I long for the days of fragrance of burning candles, goat cheese,
the buzzing honeycombs, overcooked beans, carrot porridge,
wheat soup, thyme tea, brown bread and butter from the neighbor’s cow,
the howling wolves in the shade of the Argan trees
and the harvesters’ warbles
Perhaps is a resurrection, a certain reincarnation is possible
The elders say an old ancestral wisdom is revived every 100 years.
But the nights only grow hotter in the south these days
The sun parches the fields as the private jets blemish the sky,
the wells dried up, many have sold their cattle
and land has been forfeited
Weariness and doubt creep in
What an arduous task
one assigns to oneself
When one attempts to rule
one’s soul and adapt to an imposed change.
The Sounds of War
The anemic skin, the creamed skin, the anointed skin, the skinny skin
cannot shed itself of cuts and scars, scrape and scrape!
Reality is bitter around puffy eyes
And truth is not simple wiser words
You cannot wash the lies and heartbreaks away
Memory shall always remind you,
No victory in the business of death
My grandmother, Hajjah Fatima
Suffered from anemia, but was not amnesiac
She was deaf in her left-ear
She said it was worse than losing insight in times of blight
She never liked the sounds of war
Late in quiet evenings, she would say
The sounds of war always, always
Sound far away till you realize how many were killed
You’d think you’ll never hear about them
But there is the antipathetic presenter
On big plasma screens shoving it up your face
And with that you’ll pretend to forget the sorrows,
the compunctions, the original guilt of Man
The sound of doves at dawn
The sound of little lambs in the backyard
The sound of children tossing daisies at each other in muddy streets
The sound of harvesters’ ballads in the cornfields
The memory of all that will not save you,
Will not help you find peace they say is everywhere
The anemic skin, the creamed skin, the anointed skin, the skinny skin
Cannot shed itself of cuts and scars, scrape and scrape!
Reality is bitter around puffy eyes
Truth
is
not
simple
wiser
words
You cannot wash the lies and heartbreaks away
Memory
shall always
remind you,
No victory
in the business of death
The Madman of the Village
You can claim he is mad,
but that does not mean he is crazy
Ask anybody strolling in the narrow lanes
& they would say there is sense in his mumbles.
Nothing bad about one who talks to himself,
Nothing bad about one who rambles
Nothing bad about one who sticks around
Poets talk to themselves oftentimes
Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman talked to themselves
Why send anybody up for special observation,
A week or two of electrical shock,
What good does it do to a conscious being?
I saw it man, I saw “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,”
I saw madness in young and old men wearing galoshes,
I saw it in young and old women with crew cuts and crimson lipstick
I saw it on faces of unemployed jesters, in midnight junkies,
In junior executives with drooping eyes and loose eyelashes,
I saw it in post-dawn jazz musicians whistling down the streets
I reckon to be sane;
you gotta be clean
and inoculate,
You gotta trim and primp yourself, wear new suede shoes
So you will not be looked down on for your looks
Not to stray from the same premises, the same point
They want you to pretend you hear the angels sing in heavens
To stop picking your despicable nose
To stop biting your delicious nails
& feel a blooming spring in a gloomy winter
They want you to fix your rotten teeth and wear a smile,
Buy a decent mattress for a hard floor
Kill your favorite sturdy roaches
Perhaps then you will belong
So much space between us
We who are not yet insane
So much black light from the moon bedazzles us
The distance cannot hold
The closeness shuts out any attempts
at true love, real safety
Ahmed is not the only fool of the village
Do not strap him tight, do not hold him quiet
He has got no selfish reasons like the zealous clergy,
No pride to chew on like a barren cow
You think you have the upper hand,
But remember if you keep it,
You will lose circulation in one arm (di Prima)
Growing on a Hog Farm on the Outskirts of Casablanca
Last night, I had a strange dream
I dreamed I grew up on a hog farm on the outskirts
Of Casablanca. I was quite different then.
Guilty of nothing as I had never
thought of social climbing issues,
Or been to meetings to oppose the new constitution.
I was brutally named after my grandfather
Who used to say
what you see is what you get,
Neither more nor less,
but clean-limbed.
Now, I realize why his shadow
Was on every other door I passed through.
Worries?
I had very few as everything
looked pure and calm through my lenses.
Icy saints walked around
Protecting me from staggering deaths,
And other crazy things that have always
Missed our doorstep by virtue of
My grandmother’s incantations,
And the luck we inherited.
I kind of forgot why I came to this world
or what I wanted to say
Every time we came to a long Q and A period.
Dreams became an earthy alternative
to everything we wanted to do.
They splashed on everything
to make it fit
in all my tedious Berber summers.
BIO: El Habib Louai is a Moroccan poet, translator, musician and an associate professor of English Literature at Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco. His research focuses on the cultural encounters, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory and he worked the Beats’ archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Fulbright grantee. He took creative writing courses at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado where he performed with Anne Waldman and Thurston Moore. His articles, poems and Arabic translations of Beat writers appeared in various literary magazines, journals and reviews such as World Literature Today, Al Quds Al Arabi, Al Moutaqaf, Jadaliyya, Arabli Quarterly, Al Jadeed Magazine, Al Arabi Al Jadid, Al Faisal, Al Doha, Middle East Online, Ragged Lion Journal, Big Bridge Magazine, Berfrois, Al Markaz Review, The Fifth Estate, Lumina, The Poet’s Haven, The MUD Proposal and Sagarana. Louai’s Arabic translations include America, America: An Anthology of Beat Poetry in Arabic, Michael Rothenberg’s collection of poems entitled Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story both published by Arwiqa for Translation and Studies, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain published by Dar Al Rafidain, Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus and Other Essays and Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, both published by Dar Al Libiraliya. He also contributed with Arabic translations to Seven Countries: An Anthology Against Trump’s Ban published by Arroyo Seco Press. Louai published two collections of poems: Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar which was a finalist for the 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry.