Poems of Adrian Grima

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ADRIAN GRIMA

Spring Awakens

Spring awakens with the sound of death

thumping the ground,

and the killers rejoice with their long barrel

held firmly in their hands.

Birds are hunted in Malta in Spring

Translated by Antoine Cassar

If I Had a Motorboat

If I had a motorboat

I would take it out to sea

Perhaps some immigrants would chance

To pass in the vicinity…

I would give them all they needed

To set them on their way

Towards our united Europe

of solidarity…

I would tell them of some contacts

So that when they reach their goal

They would find my friends there waiting

Who to put them at their ease

Would instruct them in their language,

Maybe also some Maltese.

But if I should chance upon

a group of immigrants in fear

in a boat that’s not seaworthy

I would take them up with me,

sail them to their destination –

a good compass, a good engine –

what more should one need to sail

towards a silent bay and shore

and to land them amongst children

armed with swimbands, and canoes

skimming water just like angels,

and the ice cream kiosks you see

in the ads, and the sun that beams like Europe

full of solidarity.

If you read this little letter

of a most burning desire

and should chance upon a boat

which should meet what I require,

you could send me a small email

and I’m sure that the Good Lord

would know who it was who gave me

just the motorboat I need

and will hand them their reward.

Let me have that little craft

Which I’d take right out to sea

Perhaps some immigrants would chance

To pass in the vicinity…

I would give them all they needed

To set them on their way

Towards our united Europe

of solidarity…

Translated by Christine Grixti and Maria Grech Ganado

Ramallah

for Khaled, Noora, Najeh, Husain and Maher of El-Funoun

who danced in Malta*

On the bridge on the river Jordan they humiliate her

they think

and she freezes and turns green and calms down between her teeth

because she needs a stamp from them on a paper on a morning

to dance upon their vacant heads sitting in a stamp

in a stamped room.

Like Noora, beautiful.

A lovely smile like Khaled

piercing,

this firm pressure

in his hands always silent

and keen.

He is telling how they are locked in a cell, standing,

how you pray that you’ll die rather than betray your own

how your broken back bursts in your head and your neck and your back

longs to lie on your back

but where? in a concrete coffin standing upright

for people who smile on their land.

Like you.

He is telling how armies close down halls

where they dance,

that amongst them are steps that could never take to

the rhythm;

he is telling how each dance, each chant, each painted picture

bursts them alive – this, this is life, this wounded dance,

this dark pirouette;

he is telling there is no place for soldiers with stars

and no place for

dictators.

On the bridge on the river Jordan

he smiles a subversive city;

and they shame him more than usual

they think.

But he has a wife at home

and children,

and he carries the story everywhere,

in his eyes, his hands, his skin,

like the taste of olives,

like the scent of mint,

like thyme.

He has a history carefully archived;

a distinctive imprint;

his verbs and nouns interflow like a river,

like cadences and consonants,

like echoes and vowels.

When you wish to, come over, he says,

and I know that now it is also my home.

Noora waits for messages sent by her friends,

and she knows they will see them,

she wants them to read them,

they can’t raise any fear

by spying, outside,

inside, or on top,

who are they? who brought them?

of what use are these emails?

are they forms of amusement?

what churns in their guts while they turn them over

like lifeless chewing gum,

like savourless kisses?

These are words without memory,

graphemes with no narrative…

And Noora revives

as she thinks of her friends

though the eyes of her spies

are vacant.

Maher spins the girl in the wheelchair

with a laugh in the room lit up by the morning

by the dabke, by the turning of shoes with her friends

in a tightening circle;

And Najeh smiles in the wake of paces of his wife and his children,

of a village remote from the city of

Ramallah, in which they were born, they dance

with his mate Husain at the other end of the circle,

they close, they open every time he raises his hand.

And the centre’s the girl in the wheelchair,

Maher swaying to the beat

and to the girl in her chair and dancing wheels.

You tell me the story of Najeh’s wife,

the waters which burst after curfew that night,

the family voices ignored at the checkpoint,

the fear of damage, the frustrated anger,

the youths with their rifles obeying their superiors

as their superiors obey their superiors in a dark pyramid

of spleen.

You tell me of a night in 2002

afraid, disheartened,

of an adamant life in a spring that’s been wrecked.

You tell me of Yamen, of a labour that’s make-shift,

unstable,

of week after week in an incubator

of a critical state

of months.

And you tell me a story

of a mother embroidering

on the porch of her home;

and the shots that came raining

without their explaining

and the distracted dance

of her daughter in trance

and her mother embroidered by guns.

“No pretence. No apology. No explanation.”

When you dance you look up at an opening sky;

you turn like a siren alight in an echoing night;

you defy the vacant eyes flitting through your Inbox.

Because your steps are mischievous,

taunting darkness and limits.

Everytime she crosses the bridge on the river

she expects to find unguarded events

waiting to be burst.

Because there’s a vacant night on the bridge,

and a birth announced in a stubborn ambulance.

There’s a dabke alight in a shattered cell,

a hold, already silent and bold;

there’s a soldier primed and a dance rehearsed;

and as soon as she crosses there’s a stage installed

and a packed hall.

Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

*Two of these stories were told by Omar Barghouti of El-Funoun in “Dancing Tragedies and Dreams” (The Daily Star, Lebanon, Wednesday, October 27, 2004)

“During the spring of 2002, when Ramallah was under lockdown, the members of el-Funoun decided to challenge the curfew and go to the studio to rehearse. They were preparing for their latest production, "Haifa, Beirut & Beyond." During this "illegal" rehearsal, a dancer's phone rang. A ringing phone during a rehearsal at the time was usually a bad omen (mobile phones are strictly forbidden during rehearsals, except during times of turmoil and insecurity, meaning most of the time). The dancer picked up his phone with trembling hands. The rest of the troupe froze, trying to interpret the news through his gestures. His pregnant wife was in early labor and all the roads from their village home to the city hospital were blocked by military barricades. He was stuck in Ramallah as his wife was about to give birth a few kilometers away. Feeling totally helpless, he cried. Though the dancer's relatives tried to drive his wife to a hospital, they were humiliated and threatened at two checkpoints, and turned back. She was forced to deliver at home with no medical supervision.

One of el-Funoun's choreographers was in the middle of making a dance about a massacre that took place during the nakba when she was interrupted with news of her mother's death. She was shot repeatedly by an Israeli soldier while she was embroidering on her front porch in Nablus. No pretence. No apology. No explanation. After a period of shock and mourning, the choreographer returned to finish her dance.”

Moon?

Samwel, a year and a half later

Since, at all costs, you want the moon by day

and since I’m meant to grant your every wish,

I offer you a sun emerging from a cloud

but no! it’s “that” you want; you don’t want “this.”

And so, despite the day, you still wait for the moon

and I know, in my heart, it can’t appear.

I offer you some memory, a moon that’s full,

but you want it right now, identical.

Because, even by day, you want to grasp the moon;

I don’t know what to do to make you glad.

“There are days,” I explain. “And there are days…”

But you don’t want the whys and wherefores. You just

want “that!”

Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

Seas Swimming in Your Eyes

Samwel, 2 ½ years, Żejtun Beach

You always want to walk beside the sea,

observe the depths, the blue from everywhere

and you persist in jumping above the edge,

although you’re old enough to have known fear.

A lover wishing to tease, with stone in hand

you want to see where it will sink, after it flies.

You long like it to meet the sea’s beginning,

to walk bewitched, seas swimming in your eyes.

The tremulous water has now usurped the moon,

distance and silence no longer keep you content.

There’s an entire sea splashing its waves around you,

and now new depths and the swish of a stone torment.

Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

Dormant Existence

I tread as slowly as I can,

in this dormant existence,

hoping that she will not notice me

silently leaving her room.

And I return without a sound,

wait for the room to empty,

so I myself can rest.

This existence needs quiet repose.

Translated by Antoine Cassar

Adrian Grima

What will you do when the night is over?

What will you do when the night is over

one more time

and daylight dawns again?

How will you tame the fire

which devours all that's hoarded inside you?

Who will pick the toxic ashes

before they clog your breath?

And who will blow away the stench

of a night drenched in hate?

When you return,

to your home by daylight,

they will rejoice to see

the hero of the twisted land

your friends and you created;

but someone, someday, is sure to ask*

and keep on asking,

and you’ll deny

and shake your deranged head,

and slide back to the night of fumes

which overcame the seething of your soul.

What will you do when deep inside

light creeps, if only for a while,

and you're consumed by moth balls?

August 2006

Translated from Maltese by Maria Grech Ganado

* It is said that Ratko Mladić‘s daughter Ana committed suicide when she learnt what her father was doing in Bosnia.[1]

Adrian Grima

[1] Slavenka Drakulić, They Would Never Hurt a Fly. War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (London: Abacus, 2004) 149.