Whoever saw a sea so narrow narrow narrow like the pupil of an eye I mean - who I have seen and it's narrowing still hardly space enough for the sputter of a strange gull small fish can find no space in which to make a turn *** Turn the discourse around Language alone discards the images and disperses them It is not me language alone So the sea invades the alleys tinier than the gurgle of snails as they suffocate *** Hardly enough of it to make a hat for the island, solitary, standing in the cold The solitary island remains head bare and alone The wind dispatches news to it the storm, which is coatless, does not arrive *** Narrow We don't have enough of it to make a shirt for a child Smaller than a handkerchief waving goodbye A narrow sea like this what am I to do with it? *** A sea that has claws and is fiercer than a bird betrayed He who knows the tiny narrow sea has the right to set sail for weeping for the island is bigger than the sea the sea *** Bigger, bigger more spacious and glorious open to the heavens and to names and to secrets not to be revealed and the sea is narrower than books and prison cells more constricted than the meetings between a prisoner and his wife *** Is the sea a harbor? Is it a peg for the tribal tent? The teardrop of a land ringed by desert? And where do the ships go? How do they cast off with the travelers, the messages the sails and the ancient fishes? *** A sea? It doesn't even wash over the first letter of the word It doesn't even wake the mountain up Funeral feasts have no special place in it *** Its messages are kept by it Its messages are meant for it alone What close-fisted sea is this? It doesn't come to rescue the drowning man It doesn't hear or see A tongue but it doesn't understand languages *** Turn the discourse around Let the sea reject *** make it rise up Give it a spaciousness and a plentitude of shores. ____________ Translated by Lena jayyusi and Cbristopber Middleton