Opinion

Affinity with nature and identification with the celestial...

There’s an atmosphere of mystics and Sufism in Al Balushi’s poetry. His treatment is characterised by an intuitive, direct and immediate subjectivity

Born in 1967, Abdullah al Balushi is among Oman’s most prolific contemporary poets. He’s published more than 10 collections. These include Crossing the Bar (1994), Immorality’s Seasons (1996), Tear’s Path (2007), The Darkness that Brightened (2016), A Bird Kneeling in Supplication on the Riverbank (2017) and Turning Away towards Triumphant Immorality (2018).

As might be inferred from these titles, there’s an atmosphere of mystics and Sufism in Al Balushi’s poetry. Divine love, universal brotherhood, transcendence of the worldly, a close affinity with nature and an intimate identification with the celestial are recurrent themes in his extensive repertoire. His treatment of these themes is characterized by an intuitive, direct and immediate subjectivity.

The following poems are from his Crossing Solitude's Bar (1994): Five Scenes before the Mirror of a Night Creature.

(1) You O bird

Cawing on the tower

Go away

I pray thunder

To bless your feathers.

(2) Orphanage is a blind tree

That digs death's chambers

Innocence is ashes falling in the gloom

Wars are finger rings that bury flocks.

(3) Next to a luminous icon

A hand holds a scene ready to fall

A mother cloaked in black

Carrying a child on her strong shoulders.

After the sea bled

My father brought an oyster

An oyster I drew with the face of a baby

Drowning in a dark ocean.

(4) The shadow dances

Behind the window's mouth

A tree planted on a grave's rim

Dropped its soul onto my solitude.

(5) Your water overflows

O night

Wash away the remnants

Of stove ashes.

Childhood’s Holy Book

Like a night it looked

I still remember it

The metamorphosis tree

I remember my silent kiss

On its fearful trunk.

Those were times I devoted to night

I planted my dawn in the sun's roots.

***

Like a shadow, I move

Might not the roots have printed

A kiss upon my lips?

I wish they'd given me a remission

I'd then live with a butterfly in the desert.

***

Like a leper,

I looked at night

That day heavens had no locked doors

And the earth was adorned with ice.

***

I remember the chant

That washed the sin every evening

The gate wide open to the wind

To the skies

To the saints

And to the Mother Tree!

***

The roots carry me to distant paths

Where I'm home to raving birds

Burned by winter.

***

Virgin are those times and travelers

Virgin are those first skulls

For they look like trees cuddled by heaven.

***

Today

Desolate is the angel's doorstep

No cradle hymn

Nor the water I bathed in some winter.

I stand before the door

Carrying many tears in the mirror.

***

Here I am

Waiting for a hand

To stroke the shiver of injury.

Shall I lean on the wall

After the roof has collapsed?

But I'll still dig the desert

To look maybe for a hill

Or for the maze of a child

Drowned in tears.

A Dream

In the corners of the world

There's some spot that shelters me again:

Blue windows

A tree on whose shadows silence sits

The travellers

Glorifying fountains and huts wrapped by angels

Might remember me

I, the forgotten in the shadow of a blind tree.