Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Visions of Daquqi (2)

Kliem of the South, Ahmed Nussaif


What are those candles that no one seems to see?
In the presence of such lights
people were looking for lamps to buy.

Then the seven became one,
in the middle of the sky's rim.
Then that fanned out to seven again.

There were connections between candles
that cannot be said. I saw, but I cannot say.
They became seven men and then seven trees,
so dense with leaves and fruit no limbs were visible.

Flashes of light
spurted from each fruit like juice.

And most marvelous of all was that hundreds
of thousands of people were passing beside the trees,
risking their lives, sacrificing everything,
to find some scrap of shade. No one saw
the trees with their tremendous shade.