dismay at a grim past and present:
Chanting of banishment,
exhaling flame,
the carriages of exile
breach the walls.
Or are these carriages
the battering sighs of my verses?
(Ibid. 44)Elements of fertility and vegetation that conventionally appear in rhetorical
exclamations of ancient Arabic poetry, receive here a contemporary twist, as
the present site is one of aridity and waste:
Cyclones have crushed us.
Sprawled in the ashes of our days, we glimpse our souls
passing
on the sword’s glint
or at the peaks of helmets.
As autumn of salt spray
settles on our wounds.
No tree can bud.
No spring...
(Ibid.)The present is only a continuum of a past that has offered no compensatory
signs of growth or rejuvenation. Adnnls looks upon the present scene of
failure as a distorted reenactment of history, a flawed reading that draws only
on signs of callousness and oppression:
Now in the final act,
disaster tows our history
toward us on its face.
What is our past
but memories pierced like deserts
prickled with cactus?
What streams can wash it?
(Ibid. 44)The emerging poem cannot work outside this ongoing consciousness, even
when poets lament a personal loss, for example in the Syrian poet Nizmr
Qabbmnl’s elegy for his mother “Umm al-Mu‘tazz,” subtitled as “Elegy to my
Mother.” In this elegy the poet sees himself as a knight in a lost battle, or a
rover among cities of death and disaster: “I emerged from one death/into
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS