Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

The tribal and the poetical in Qmsim >addmd’s poem

Qmsim >addmd’s poem “Ishrmqmt Yarafah Ibn al-Wardah,”^27 (Epiphanies/
illuminations of Yarafah Ibn al-Wardah) has eighteen sections, each signifies
a moment in the life and poetry of the ancestor and the successor or ephebe.
In the first section the addressee is feminine and the poem creates a sense of
loss and yearning that recalls traditional classical naslb(the elegiac prelude).
On the other hand, its feminine addressee could stand for a cause, feminized
in Arabic as qa,iyyah.

Take me

In my language

and in best years there is the children’s joyful elation

Deep in the sea

The thread of poetry weaves my sails

And my ships are embroidered with flowers of nostalgia

Take me

And open up this universe window

I am mad

And infatuation is my rhyme

And I am a child in this madness of mine

Open up

And take over a dream that sprouts, vein bleeding

from my blood like jasmine.

In the second section, the poet endows the body with power, and the heart
with love to merge into a poetic site of great density.

In prison I glow as cutting as a sword

Conversing with the desert’s sadness

Whenever the cell becomes narrower

The parts of my heart expand

I involve the poem in adventure

And emanate as letters in names.

With this implication of fusion into names, the poet develops the rest of the
poem into a stanzaic exchange between his present imprisonments, love for his
homeland, and his ancestors’ experience of love and torture or banishment. In
section six, the addressee is this homeland.

From among the women of the world

One brought the universe to my heart:

My beloved

From among the lands of the world one is more than all lands of bliss

The homeland that settles in my heart.

POETIC DIALOGIZATION