Nabilah Al-Zubair, Yemen

Por: Nabilah Al-Zubair
Traductor: Barbara Croken and Antelak M. Al-Mutawakel

Still

Whenever my head shattered a wall
I said: "I still have a head"
Whenever a wall shattered my head
I said: "There is still a wall in front of me"

Documenting

Between a poem and a poem
There is an age
Of memory's emptiness
Who will document nonexistence?
It is
The age of the poet

It Happens

It happens that
We meet at the very beginning
Nothing behind
We go away from it
No poem
No tree
It happens
That we meet
Time separates us
We run away ... lip to lip
It happens that we meet
"Something" makes us strangers
Stuck together
Driven apart
By a hair

Corners

On my walls there are eyes
On the walls of the people
There is a mirror
On the mirrors there is half a heart
Assuming the best ... died

Friendship

We were on the verge of friendship
Until he hunted ready-made wings
While I was sculpting other wings
Which can not be hunted

A Hailstone of Lightening

A flash

Drowning me in hailstones
Covering me with a cloak of storm
I sweat in fear
(Are there no butterflies to break it???)
I part the crowd: passers-by and racket
The cups have been drunk, the chairs are alerted
The pores of distance are shrunk, the table collapses
Did I ask for a wall for the crowd?
Did I ask them for more doubt?
Your silence folds the wall
I will depart
You are blocking my steps
You are staring: (You scattered birds)
From my horizons
Release your hands
Steps walking carefully
I walk on two pains
Count: How many days and nights
Fall on my shoulders?
Uncountable: the injuries you caused me
I shiver..
(No dove lays you a poem??)
Streets crossed by ... heart beats
You are capable of silence
So why then, do the prison bars lean toward me?

I shiver

I enter the crowd .. Rushing.. Crushed
The heart's rudder moves us to and fro
You are always kinder..
I sneak love
I encourage the astonishment
No trees ... no streets ... no outside ... everything is inside
A cloak shook off a flash and shook me off 
Tens of women fell beneath it ... I'm not one of them
I shook off love
Nothing between us
Except that I am not ... just any one

She was born in 1964 andr began writing in the early 1980s, and her first poetry collections were published in the 1990s. Her first novel, My Body, was published in 2000, and her poetry collections include: Motowalyat al-Katheba Al Ra’ey’a (Succession of The Great Lie, 1991), Thamet Baher Y’awedeni (There’s a Sea Returning to Me, 1997), Mahyia (Obliteration, 1999); Tenween al-Ghay’eb (The Third Person Pronoun, 2001), and Sa’ood ela Fardet Kabreet (Ascending to a Single Matchstick, 2003). She is also a prolific journalist and campaigner for social change in Sana’a.