The Guard of Deceit

Khaled Khalifa

Alone, as I always am, I do not enter through closed doors. My departure exhausts me, and the moons on the brass-hued nights hang over the gates of Damascus. Damascus, the abyss of waiting and crystal walls… near the scent of its women and the urine of its men, near its last collapses, I crouch before its gates like a jackal forgotten by loneliness, overcome by a longing for the howl of wolves now. Now, Damascus splits me: “You are the son of the echo.” My mother’s cunning voice reaches me from the furthest reaches, the reaches open to the possibilities of the miracle that evaporated from between my mother’s naked dresses under the moonlight, and the king’s men hunt fish and scatter their bullets at migrating flocks of birds, which fall into the arms of the peasant women scattered in the fields. Wild pigeons, partridges without beaks, without eyes, and with only dark wings. The king’s men search for empty bullets, for my mother’s path and my umbilical cord, and they continue hunting, smoking, blaspheming, and ejaculating into the river waters. My mother’s voice, mixed with the creaking of Damascus’s doors that never opened for me, calls out: “Wait seven centuries.”