User:Bleedinggull/sandbox

Raed Anis Al-JISHI

(poet, translator; Saudi Arabia)has an honorary fellowship in writing from Iowa university. a member of Advisory committee of Exguisit Teacher Training plan of National Changhua University of Education has published one novel, seven volumes of poems in Arabic and one, Bleeding Gull: Look, Feel, Fly, in English. Alongside a career as a writer, he teaches high school chemistry in his native city of Qatif. He is a feminist and human rights activist, and works on issues involving children and literacy. His participation is made possible by the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh.

selection of poems

Translated by Amira Rammah

The Arrival of Seagulls

I have seen gulls, in holy visions, hover and invent the sound of horses. I have seen them give alms to rats hungry for crumbs of bread, crucified on the altar. I have seen them flap their wings and swallow common rules of fish. Reinvent the physics of a silver talisman’s dance on the sea’s curve. I have seen rats feast at the fall of dusk. They claim to be the genesis of light.

A Dance of Bullets

If out of passion I strained my heart, it doesn’t matter. You crossed each alley of my inner streets - mirrored the dream running through my veins, and from my garden, plucked, the love grown from a pear tree. If I offer you roses distilled from my blood and if, in your honor I play the anthem of salvation with my heart’s beats, it doesn’t matter. Home, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if all you could offer me is a dance of bullets.

Boundless

No borders for bounty, with a thousand parties and factions, and woes crown kings of passion. I’m all & nothing for the great & worthy belong only to the free word. Leave me then. I chose mirrors as a mode of reflection and will - a compass for my path.  The Genesis of Clay

I wear clay masks made out of sapless soil. Call on the storm cloud chained by the bleak cold to join the thrill of the newborn wind on a pearl muffled with pride.

Baffled Gunpowder

Baffled, the gunpowder disparages you With what pride did God mold your hands? Each time, you called on Death upon their divine revelations, Death prostrated itself and prayed like the heavens for your sake. On Love & Death I’ll surrender to Love if that’s her wish My hand reaches out to stroke her shadow resting by twilight's woes As I doze, I open one eye trace in my memory the shape of her little smile. I saw her eyelids frozen to a prayer. I could love, I could love and die her way. writing sample

Raed Anis AL-Jishi IWP'15 writing sample - pdf copy