Who Am I, Without Exile?

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing makes me descend from the pharaoh's boats. Nothing carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing and not promise. What will I do? What will I do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams to my reality: not dust and not fire. What will I do without roses from Samarkand? What will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar stones? Our weight has become light like our houses in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity's land. What will we do … what will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... There's nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you but me, the stranger massaging his stranger's thigh: O stranger! what will we do with what is left to us of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths? And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house. Was this road always like this, from the start, or did our dreams find a mare on the hill among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it? And what will we do? What will we do without exile?