Ghassan Zaqtan is a contemporary Palestinian poet who has been widely published in Arabic. His first collection translated to English contains selections from 1998-2008. The title is drawn from Zaqtan’s concern with what are only fragments of poems, “…beginnings that flap like wings in my head” (“Black Horses”, 18). “In the year two thousand or a little before, there might have been / a prelude that inhabited me, it resembled summer /…/ Like a straw bird / it follows me.” (“The Bird Follows Me”, 1-2,16-17)

Zaqtan’s verse is unquestionably the work of a poet from a region where conflict, loss, exile and displacement are the backdrop to everyday life. These themes are common in his verse, but explored in a voice that is highly personal. Death is ever-present on these pages and Zaqtan’s spirits are noisy and restless, unable to find peace.

The Dead in the Garden

Don’t open the window
don’t wake up
I beg you don’t wake up…
they were dancing on the garden grass
as if they were the garden’s motive
or its meditation
and they were screaming there

Beneath the light
their dust was coming apart (1-9)

Everything As It Was

What led him over there
in such cold weather?
Not longing or curiosity
but maybe fear or perhaps it was
the chill in the room,
though everything appeared as it was,
as he wrote in an old poem he could not finish

“…Everything is still as it was
since we had gone out to war,
since childhood or before,
……………………………………………….

“everything was as if nothing had changed.
Perhaps we
we who fell upon the war
from the school bell…”

That was in the summer of 1986 in Damascus, his mother was still alive then
And there was an opening somewhere in that poem, more like a hole that followed
him,
he’d heard it stumble behind him wherever he went, especially when toward the
anxious
endings in his dreams, and even there, they, the boys who did not return after the
midnight
patrols, and the dead who went back to sit on the doorsteps of their houses

Now he feels a saunter in him through that opening,
without knowing exactly where it is,
and where the poem is, in its painful incompleteness (1-10, 22-37)

There is diversity and depth in this collection that is difficult to capture in less than the full text of the poems. I have read these poems several times over the past year, hesitating to share my thoughts without feeling the assurance of having mastered their meaning. But each time I visit them, I find more to connect with and more that remains elusive, awaiting discovery, and I remember that this is as it should be with great poetry.

Not Yet

Whenever I say it’s time I went
The songs I thought would never return arrive
And the old hands knock on my door
Hands that thought of me
Or shepherded my roads
In a time that was …obliterated. (11-16)

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