Two Poems

Two Poems by Ashur Etwebi poetry How Can You Recognize a Blue Morning? How can you recognize a blue morning? The sea to his right, the desert to his left. What voices does the morning carry? Bullets of ignorant militias. Is it right to start blue mornings with coffee? Begin with vodka if you can. Then my morning is really blue. I read fragments of Lorca this morning. Have you tried reading Al Harith Ibn Hilleza poems? I inherited nothing from my father except the art of disappearance. He was a chef or a sous chef . . . Is your cane beside you? In a silence of doors, you only hear the knocking of your footsteps. James Byrne is a poet, editor, and translator. His most recent poetry collection is Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015). Ashur Etwebi was born in 1952 in Libya. Since December 2014, he has been living in Norway after he was attacked by extremists and his house in Tripoli was burned down. He is one of Libya’s leading poets and is also an editor, translator, and painter. Ars Poetica Standing on the stone path of childhood silence, this is poetry. A frail mosquito sits, exhausted and confused, this is poetry. A bird’s feather swings in morning’s hammock, this is poetry. Sand grains steal the rhythm of my feet, this is poetry. A dream wheels through the soul’s pendulum, this is poetry. Bubbles floating from the fins of a fish, this is poetry. A lizard’s gesture in the tilting of time, this is poetry. Translations from the Arabic By James Byrne with the author In the Presence of the Simurg, by Ashur Etwebi WORLDLIT.ORG 41 ...

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