The Poetryzine magazine presents the selected poems by the Egyptian writer Ashraf Aboul-Yazid
A Prison
The dreaming prisoner
Is asking his unjust guard
“How would you know
You are not my prisoner?
Aren’t we separated by
The same bars?!”
Sadness
Sadness is a woman in love with me.
She dances for me till
the awaking of dawn.
And continues her seduction till
the sunset of my life.
Very good
Every Evening
Every evening we exchange
our lost wars,
to get rid of them.
Piece by piece as strippers do.
And silently we scatter ourselves,
to continue watching
the dreams we had at night.
Evenings
1
Looking for unused faces
In the piles of destroyed masks
To conceal
– When I meet you –
Some sadness used to cover
The continent of my heart.
2
Being tortured by some songs
I threw my ears beyond the noisy silence.
To hear the same repeated news.
3
Before the thousand closed doors
Of the palace of sorrow in my heart
I stand,
Without a key.
4
I tie the stone of silence to my head
And fall,
In the sea of sleep,
Like an anchor splitting
The ocean’s breast!
5
Rising from my head,
The memory of death grows,
To fall in my inkpot.
It makes the passed away people
Scatter as letters do
in the wind’s hands.
Those are the crossing illusions
In my heart,
I shall never feel calm,
Till my heart puts its anchor
In the skin of darkness.
6
I tell my daughter a story
Before she sleeps,
But we are always attacked by night
Before the prince of our tale
Meets the lady with the crystal shoe.
7
Shut the window of the day
in the face of last night’s dreams.
To cry behind the curtains
of my forgotten days.
Bread
How hard are these days
Which run the sadness of the world
in our hearts.
No matter how much we put
the bread of our estrangement
In the tea cup of nostalgia.
It is getting drier, harder,
and more bitter.
A Wound
Our thick blood will dry on wounds
and be thrown by the angry wind,
to find places for
The new ones.
Our scattered drops of blood
on the sandy roads
are drunk by the desert plants
to grow thorns
ready to attack a wild plant.
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