Born in 1967, Abdullah al Balushi is among Oman’s most prolific contemporary poets. He’s published more than 10 collections. These include Crossing the Bar (1994), Immorality’s Seasons (1996), Tear’s Path (2007), The Darkness that Brightened (2016), A Bird Kneeling in Supplication on the Riverbank (2017) and Turning Away towards Triumphant Immorality (2018).
As might be inferred from these titles, there’s an atmosphere of mystics and Sufism in Al Balushi’s poetry. Divine love, universal brotherhood, transcendence of the worldly, a close affinity with nature and an intimate identification with the celestial are recurrent themes in his extensive repertoire. His treatment of these themes is characterized by an intuitive, direct and immediate subjectivity.
The following poems are from his Crossing Solitude's Bar (1994): Five Scenes before the Mirror of a Night Creature.
(1) You O bird
Cawing on the tower
Go away
I pray thunder
To bless your feathers.
(2) Orphanage is a blind tree
That digs death's chambers
Innocence is ashes falling in the gloom
Wars are finger rings that bury flocks.
(3) Next to a luminous icon
A hand holds a scene ready to fall
A mother cloaked in black
Carrying a child on her strong shoulders.
After the sea bled
My father brought an oyster
An oyster I drew with the face of a baby
Drowning in a dark ocean.
(4) The shadow dances
Behind the window's mouth
A tree planted on a grave's rim
Dropped its soul onto my solitude.
(5) Your water overflows
O night
Wash away the remnants
Of stove ashes.
Childhood’s Holy Book
Like a night it looked
I still remember it
The metamorphosis tree
I remember my silent kiss
On its fearful trunk.
Those were times I devoted to night
I planted my dawn in the sun's roots.
***
Like a shadow, I move
Might not the roots have printed
A kiss upon my lips?
I wish they'd given me a remission
I'd then live with a butterfly in the desert.
***
Like a leper,
I looked at night
That day heavens had no locked doors
And the earth was adorned with ice.
***
I remember the chant
That washed the sin every evening
The gate wide open to the wind
To the skies
To the saints
And to the Mother Tree!
***
The roots carry me to distant paths
Where I'm home to raving birds
Burned by winter.
***
Virgin are those times and travelers
Virgin are those first skulls
For they look like trees cuddled by heaven.
***
Today
Desolate is the angel's doorstep
No cradle hymn
Nor the water I bathed in some winter.
I stand before the door
Carrying many tears in the mirror.
***
Here I am
Waiting for a hand
To stroke the shiver of injury.
Shall I lean on the wall
After the roof has collapsed?
But I'll still dig the desert
To look maybe for a hill
Or for the maze of a child
Drowned in tears.
A Dream
In the corners of the world
There's some spot that shelters me again:
Blue windows
A tree on whose shadows silence sits
The travellers
Glorifying fountains and huts wrapped by angels
Might remember me
I, the forgotten in the shadow of a blind tree.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
