My share of sleep:
four hours eleven minutes.
I roll my pierced heart
across the bedcover:
it slams into the door,
leaving
a line of mud behind.
I believe
a tree
will come one night
and stop
beside the line.
Another tree
will follow,
and a third,
a fourth,
a ninth,
etc.
One night
the line will grow
and become a street.
One night
while I’m sleeping
friends will stream
out of my head
and into the street
to sleep beneath the trees.
And I,
one night,
will wake
from fear of solitude
and follow them.
© Mazen Maarouf. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2014 by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Nathalie Handal. All rights reserved.
