Zahir al Ghafri’s cosmopolitanism is such that one can hardly find any treatment of local themes in his entire oeuvre
Dr Khalid Mohammed al Balushi Born in 1956, Zahir al Ghafri is among the first poets championing verse free poetry in Oman. Thematically, there’s a marked transcendence of all manner of ideological affiliations in his poetry.
In fact, his cosmopolitanism is such that one can hardly find any treatment of local themes in his entire oeuvre. The following are translations of poems from his Whenever an Angel Appeared in the Fort published in Beirut in 2008.
The Stranger
Those sitting care not about the stranger.
I left my life there between the stones
Here I am
Like someone hunting dusk’s glow.
Must all these years have passed
To discover I was but a cry
Returning from death
From solitude lighter than a bird’s feather
Carrying regret’s smell and shadows? My straying glance
Knits a snare from my distant past
And every word I utter to myself
Raises my lofty destiny Like a bow broken on a ladder.
Light rain on the window
A black cloud-clothed face Just like that
The underground prince lands
Carrying an icon that swings
Like a copper necklace.
I say neither mind nor forest
Will be at peace
Like a sickle, truth passes by my face. From one city to another I plunge into rivers empty of friendship
Resort to fear
To charms
To the magic of bygone days
Knowing the arrow shall never cease.
My heart is a temple for angels
And a single step
Just a single step
Over garden’s grass is enough.
O God
Should I find but a white hand in the river
Whenever I peek through the window? There’s no father, no mother, no bed to say to me: “Sleep beneath the sun”.
My loss is but certain in what I own
I owned no home or gods’ foresight.
I’m probably a lost creature Under a star
Behind the light of a curtain.
Regret is the garment
Of those I love
My boughs are still white
Thus I raise my hand to write: Wilderness is Iram zaat Al’imad
And my towering fruits. Those sitting
Care not about the stranger. Beside the fountain
The pavements filled with butterflies tonight
An injured ibex with a bloody kneeI walk by, hear a sound Like a breeze descending on the hand: “There’s no life
Nor a mother suckling ancestors. Go there
To that forest. Your guide is a torch
In the tiger’s eye. Go there
Die alone
Behind a dome buried in the fog.
Karin Boye I’ll talk to you tonight I’ll talk to the angel in you
The angel sleeping next to the grave.
I’ll talk to you, Karin Boye
As you look with your fiery eyes
At the crystal tempest
While the gun fog covers the city’s night. Femininity is a flower on a suicide bed
A flower that raises the call of hands
To the heights. That voice is yours
It rings like an ibex chased in a wasteland
Coming from freedom’s banks
Your voice digs a grave above hills.
Leave God asleep on the bough
Take a cup of wine
From the fountain’s stone
For the third millennium.Miracles are few these days
But pain usually comes
Before everybody’s eyes
Here or there.
Your life was a forty year old cloud
Filled with butterflies
But remember
Either in the forest or on the river’s edge
Boys stay up on your fingertips’ light
Like buds opening up in the air.
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