Amjad Nasser

An Attempt at a Poem for New York

Translated by Sarah Maguire

--------------------------------- I ---------------------------------

But before what happened had happened -
I mean, before those towers were turned into twin lifts to the apocalypse,
sundering the world into two worlds: one world of sand, one world of water -

I wanted to be
one of those poets
who blasted New York.

Truth is, I'd already written this poem in my head.
Part of that distinguished tradition, after Lorca -
driven by Whitman rather than Gibran -

Lorca who taught us to fire poems like darts
deep in the great apple's flesh -
that cobra of money and sex, that vast Babeltower of newness and nowness -

and all without tossing our cigarette butts in the Hudson,
without jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge,
or jiving away the jazzwailing lightningcrashing black nights of Harlem.

You see, we know that the Statue of Liberty was designed for the Suez Canal,
that her face is the face of a young Egyptian peasant -
and we know when the Egyptians went bankrupt to the muzak of Aida,

that they sold her down the river -
across the Sea of Darkness (as they called it, an omen)
to that newland fattening its wealth.

So what does it matter
if poets take the subway while watching their backs,
or if they've not even passed through the gates to that underworld?

Why not try your hand
at making up New York, at mocking New York,
the final lines cutting to that sodomandgomorrah ending?

Why bother setting eyes on the cards being stacked,
or the blacktears of the Blacks,
as love goes up in smoke?

Why bother witnessing the scuzzyfeathered pigeons -
New York's very own doves, good for nothing, bad for peace -
screeching down the stonework, from the stoneye of the storm?

 

--------------------------------- II---------------------------------

Truth is, I've never been to America.
Like everyone else, it's entered my bloodstream in films, in dreams, and in wars...
and, battered by its coruscating caterwauling metallic machines

its riverfulls of blood, its deserts of drought,
I've been left with just the dregs of two real emotions:
Love, and Hate.

Truth is, even when I once fetched up in Canada
I completely ignored my brother Ahmad's call -
poor Ahmad whom Fate tossed from the westcoast to the eastcoast,

who clung onto his life behind the reinforced security glass of the gas station
while his workmate was gunned down right by his side -
I never returned Ahmad's call,

I turned my back on my brother
because I feared that entering Upper Manhattan
would fuck up my masterpiece, my New York epic, its big sound and fury

just coming to the boil, rather nicely,
on my slow fires
of hate..........................................................................................................................

But after what happened had happened -
I mean after 9/11
after the year of those two false prophets and their sham Satanic conjurings,

after the shock of fissured epistemology, of metaphysical shatterings,
when man was gobsmacked to discover
that, despite all that posturing,

his hands had never been wings in the first place,
but were just a pair of question marks -
after what happened had happened

I came to the conclusion
my New York poem
was history.

So, the city will be spared, at least for the present,
yet another mocking masterpiece in verse
sounding off about its stuckup uptight tightarsed complacencies..................................

.......................................................................................................
....................................................................................
..................................................

Fanfare. Endgame. Curtains.

- But, hold on, maybe I can come up with another attempt at an ending:
Maybe, if New York wants to know why what happened
has happened,

we should all remember that proverb:
What goes around
comes around.

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