ESSIA SKHIRI

ESSIA SKHIRI

Nostalgia

From the myth of the first creation

We can, if we want, to arise

So that

With our hands,

We sculpt again

The anthem of a heavenly love

In the spirit of clay, fire and water…

And the kiss becomes

Closer than a meagre impulse

Waiting for the resurrection signal

Following the lightning glorifying life...

I have nostalgia for the rain and your arms...

Your arms are an embrace of the tenth heaven

Where all the deepest secrets

Reveal

Labyrinth ...

And Yet We Are The Lovers

It sometimes happens to words to stumble in your presence

And the labyrinth curls up on its sadness

Oh, my homeland

That excels at burying its face

Which we loved so much

.

.

.

It happens also to the time

To become, sometimes, a stranger in our souls

And so that an expression that insists

To sink between the lines

Do not tumble

I should also to emphasise/ note:

"It always happens that we are strangers

In an unknown jungle of a heartless time”

These shreds of my poem

Could they endure my eager desire to babble?

.

.

.

O time

That wants to emerge from within a thousand of meaning

From which cave

That the sun of God had never seen

You have come

To chew our loss along the labyrinths

And the moments

In My Loneliness

You penetrate

My flesh

My bones

My blood

You flow

Through my arteries

You emerge in my dream

In my darkness

In my scattered steps

In my shaky steps

In my stumbling steps

In my lost steps

In my confused steps

In my blind steps

In my dizzy steps

You spring up in my loneliness

Like a poem

Telling my nostalgia for a perfect language

Which had never been dispersed…

Lightness

Is it the softness of the lightness?

Which devoured me?

It is the sweetness of lightness

Which devoured me....

It often happens that lightness has wings of fire, 
testing the capacity of our fragility 
to counter our stumbling steps 
and to challenge that vertigo
 which excels at biting our senses during our ascent...

The ascent, that deserves to risk for, 
whatever the cost of adventure

.

.

.

And it happens

In many other cases

That this lightness breaks us

When, suddenly,

We tumble

In a free fall, having no pity on our fragility,

Towards an abyss

Where there is no other meeting in its bottom

Only with the embrace of nothingness.

The Panorama Amazement

Over there

Where the celestial dome

Cradled from the beginning of creation

In the silence of the forgotten plains…

On the tips of her eyelashes,

The solitary night hums

A wrapped song

Of whiteness and absence

Going with dozing serenity

On the top of the extended precipice

Towards the most distant borders of light

Over there

On the roof of the world

Where the walker in the storm

Explores the secrets of the descendent 
of the ancient salt countries

Calling him:

O, you, the stranger, the disseminated

In the hum of time

Come!

Maybe in your palms

My fire petals can flourish

This promised soul to wander

Is he the one whose crimson vision

Had unveiled my nostalgia and loneliness

So you can get me here

Filled with your shelled dreams

And your broken femininity

Garnished with floating fragments of evanescent certainty...

Or else

Is the flower covered with its burning snow

Isn’t you...

The dispersed in an eternal instant

The scattered in the debris of a time

Extending over lost isthmus *

And secretly listening to

The songs of the dead that death had abandoned...

............. And you, the spread

In the corpse of sobbing time

Are you not these corundums

Which the frost flower hug

Full her moments

To be your frozen water

When in her illusory scales,

Slides the sun

To kiss your fragments

Is it she

The leafy frost flower in its distance away

At the bottom of the navel of the universe

Since a thousand nothingness

Are you the one who embraces her without means

Or else is she destined for the panorama of sorrow

Since she had blossomed here

A lonely frost flower

Over there

Where the flaming orange praises the blue

Both, gushing

In the dazzle of an amputated beginning

"The rainbow, the ephemeral witness!" says (M R), 
the refugee in the hermitage, in his isolation

No one can cross the soul of the instant

Except the one who hides, by chance, in his womb

No one can grasp the wandering moment

Only the one who takes refuge in his turbulent fragility

When he inspires him the desire to fall into the void

When he spreads nostalgia

Of a curse that will not repent

Between his ribs

So that it reaches him

Filled with the smell of foreign songs

Lost in the quintessence

A distant coming from the caves

Praising the stars, she collects on the tips of her fingers

And that she disperses

On the walls of its luxurious solitude

Deer

And wolves that cloned eras had not hybridized

Dinosaurs that never died on the pages of an indifferent history

Written with the sap of oblivion

A flower whose fragrance spills out into the world

To take refuge in the frost of an equivocal gleam

In the fire of the stranger's chest

When she gives birth to an extinct desire

Gushing to live her eternal death

In the nebula of memory.

Who insinuated you that the moment is treacherous?

Who suggested to you that the moment can murder?

The dream of an isolated woman who is covered with crystals of your frozen water

Over there on a mountain that had come true

In order to be the essence of the questions

Of an ephemeral frequenting the silence while taking refuge in the navel of the distraction.

Note:

* The isthmus: in Muslim culture, it is a place between our universe and the other world where souls gather from death to resurrection

Translated to English by Mrs Najah Skhiri, an English teacher in secondary schools

ESSIA SKHIRI

ESSIA SKHIRI is a Tunisian writer and translator. She was born on May 12 th, 1961 in Sousse. Among her works:  - "Ports of wandering» a collection of short stories, which was awarded the High Supreme Council Of Culture (Ministry of Culture) In Egypt. - "Her wings are wind", a novel published in Lebanon. - "Her Hands Spelling light" a collection of poems published in Egypt. And several other translations:- "There, where the tigers are at home", a novel by Jean Marie Blas De Roblès edited by the Supreme Council of Culture in Egypt (ministry of culture).- "The secret wedding," a Gerard Caramaro novel published in Jordan.- Anthology of science fiction short stories of Latin America, published in England...- ""Automation of love" by Abbas Mahamed Amara" a collection of poems published in France (Spinelle editions). Several other works have followed and have been published in other different Arab and European countries.