Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

When the shore appears, I bend away with my mast

Towards the endlessness of the waters

Counting the waves: wave by wave

The empowering sense of freedom and release gives her a new voice, a voice
that shapes the newly emerging poem of little cares, personal occupations,
and details beyond the rhetoric of ideology that distinguishes the neoclassical
poem.

I yell at the sea:

More of your remoteness.

Fortitude is futile, frustration and conversations

go on and on around the fireplace.

The days have numbers, the faces have names

And the masks mime according to the time

recorded on the clock in the

piazza of the city.

This voice achieves a sense of freedom through a self-critique which is central
to this new consciousness. It is only through self-interrogation that the
speaker can understand the reasons behind the present estrangement from
tradition and community. Both are replaced by new commercialism, leaving
the speaker a solitary individual.

Selling is a god, Buying is a god. And you,

they have abandoned you. They let you fall

into oblivion, yes, you:

the distant traveling of the unknown in the

darkness: the drunkenness of the night and the air.

So drunk am I with the night, the air, and the trees

I have carried you, Sea, upon my forehead

You that carry no name, the journey to the unseen

through you and in you, the whole

universe is reduced to the circles of the water:

the tides of death and birth

And the silence ofthe migrating birds

Between the poles.

The poem works its navigation through topography of waters, waves, and
shores that are mapped by birds, the speaker’s correlatives for the free soul
beyond limits and borders.

You, migrating birds:

Go tell the shores you are reaching

THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS