To the men snoring softly
in their curves of camel-shade:
I send you snowy dreaming.
God grant this.
Rhyse Maddocks was born in Cardiff, and studied Arabic at Swansea University. He moved to Morocco teaching English, where he grew to love the Darija language, and its poetry.
Ayoub Skila (1976-2014) was a well-known, self-taught Berber and Darija poet. He inherited his father’s Argan orchard, and worked it all his life. He considered poetry a noble, though secondary, pastime.
I
I am tall, and gaunt. My hair is quite long, as is my beard— as are my nails—as is my stare— as are the hesitant and confused motions of my limbs. I have fed upon grass and flowers for some time, longer than I can remember, and the bitter taste of dandelion sap is stuck to my palate; but suddenly, and only by mistake, I come out of the forest onto a busy street and, startled myself, cause several startled drivers to stop and ask some questions that I hear, yes, I hear them, and I remember their sounds, but what they signify I have forgotten, or I am too tired to recall. I smile at them, joyful to see them (of course I am joyful— I would not smile if I was not joyful— I am beyond all pretending now, though surely I must once have done very much pretending), and they try to keep me in one place, which is at a small distance from themselves. I understand, deep down, that I am naked, and that I do not look well, but I am conscious only of the desire to touch these dear, sympathetic creatures. Soon an ambulance arrives and takes me away, and though I don’t quite understand what is happening, the paramedics are so kind that I don’t care— their tender concern falls upon me like the warm sun of a windless day.
II
Perhaps the most natural thing to find at the center of a subterranean labyrinth is an enormous and mostly buried figure. Buried not intentionally, nor by any labor of the hands, but merely from sitting so still for so long, and the dirt sifting from the roof of that expanse over the course of centuries— with every oblivious paw that treads the surface, with every slight warp of the earth in frost and thaw— evenly covering that figure. Only several notches of the spine remain visible, each the size of a fist, and the taut skin about them, as well as some portion of the nape.
And likely the most natural place to find the stairway to such a labyrinth is in the forest, under a hatch, under earth as flush with grubs and flora as the rest of the forest floor. The hatch would be, of course, mostly rotted, so that the strange lettering it bears is indecipherable. And certainly the most natural way to find this place is by accident, on the third day of having been lost in the forest, while digging up root vegetables to eat.
And undoubtedly the most natural response to such a thing is to begin digging up the soft earth around this massive figure, to satisfy the urgent behest of curiosity. Digging more and more fiercely, one dreams: that it has the same noble, noble, piercing eyes as the David; and, wiping the sweat from one’s brow, leaving there in its place only a more inconvenient streak of dirt, that once exhumed it will be grateful to one. And after all, who knows? Who knows but it will be?
Charlie Dunn lived and died in Ypsilanti, and never succeeded in publishing his work. His father and friends are doing their best to get his writing into publication. He has been previously published in Detroit Lit Mag.
I clomb the—well, the wall—what was a wall—
of a ruined church just slouching by the way,
and gripping where the mortar’d failed the stones
I caught the bell’s attendant chain, and pulled,
showering the whole forsaken valley
with a ripe and spacious fruit, wide, heavy, fruit,
(just as, an hour before, by stairs of stone,
I shook some apple boughs above my wife,
that she could catch the boughthest fruits,
for I could not without falling).
The author of two chapbooks, Crow Lungs (2013), and In Modica the Gargoyle (2019), Simon Avery is a well-on-his-way poet and writer and SAT tutor from Cleveland, OH. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Kenyon Review.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This poem utilizes two famous tropes of Moroccan (Darija) poetry: the first and more common is the “expression of great and unexplained sorrow.” The other is the “poetry of coinage:” a stanza is presented as if the poet had walked himself into a linguistic or rhyming dead-end, which he must circumvent by means of a coinage. Due to the nature of translation, and my own shortcomings, I have been unable to transmit the clear necessity of the coinage except by this note.
With wild resound of donkey-bray
In low-tide’s amphitheatres of stone,
Let the feeling of my heart oppress this
Unboundment.
You women, stooped with seaweed-gathering!
You go to your labours, and rest comes to you;
But my frayed heart continues out of reason
Burging.
Let it uproot the scrub instead, and blast the dust,
And terrify all creatures in the coast,
So that they go like refugees, arms overhead and
Unwhereward.
Then would I roam gladly through, like a gust,
Or like the workless donkeys of the white women,
November-Saffron laden merely, and for that
Rindlavished.
Rhyse Maddocks was born in Cardiff, and studied Arabic at Swansea University. He moved to Morocco teaching English, where he grew to love the Darija language, and its poetry.
Ayoub Skila (1976-2014) was a well-known, self-taught Berber and Darija poet. He inherited his father’s Argan orchard, and worked it all his life. He considered poetry a noble, though secondary, pastime.
May my desire
grow old with you—
May it tire—
and gutter, when your pupils do—
and snuff its little fire
in your irises’ chill pools.
May we go calmly where we must,
and gracefully descend;
As when a fire attains its end
and ashen twigs to ashes fall:
so let us gently lay our dust
upon the dust of all.
Tim Myhrberg is a computer programmer living in northern New York state close to Montreal. He and his wife have always loved reading poetry together, and writing it for one another.
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