Strangers' Walk

I know the house from the bunch of sage. The first of the windows leans toward the butterflies...blue... red. I know the clouds' handwriting and the well where it will wait fro the village women in summer. I know what the dove says when it lays an egg on the mouth of a gun. I know who opens the door to the jasmine as it opens our dreams to the evening guest... The strangers' carriage still hasn't arrived No one's arrived. Leave me there like you'd leave your greeting at the entrance of a house. To me or to someone else, without concern for who'll hear it first. Leave me, there, a few words for myself: Was I alone? 'Solitary, like the soul in a body,' when you said, once: I love you both, you and the water. The water shone in everything, like a guitar that let itself cry! The stangers' guitar still hasn't arrived Let's be good! Take me to the sea at sunset, so I'll hear what it tells you when it returns to itself, still, still I won't change. I'll slip into a wave and say: Take me to the sea again. This is what the frightened do with themselves: They go to the sea when a star, aflame in the sky, torments them The stangers' song still hasn't arrived I know the hosue from the fluttering scarves. The first of the doves cries on my shoulders. Beneath the sky of the Gospels a child runs aimlessly. Water runs. The pines run. The wind runs in the wind. The earth runs in itself. I said: Don't bein a rush when you leave the house. Nothing prevents this place from pausing fro a moment, here, while you put on the day's shirt and the shoes of the wind The strangers' myth still hasn't arrived... No one's arrived. So leave me there like you leave the myth with whomever sees you, and he cries, and runs in himself afraid of his happiness: I love you so, you are so much yourself! Afraid of his soul: There is no 'I' now, but 'she' in me There is no 'she' but my fragile 'I'. At the end of this song, how much I fear that my dream may not see its dream in her. No one's arrived Perhaps the stangers lost thier way to the stangers' walk! Translated By Amira El-Zein and Jeffrey Sacks