Sama Essa has been particularly influential in both introducing and solidifying verse-free prose poetry in Oman
Essa al Tai, famously known for his pen name Sama Essa, is a pioneering contemporary Omani poet. Along with Saif al Rahbi (1956) and Zahir al Ghafri (1956), Al Tai has been particularly influential in both introducing and solidifying verse-free prose poetry in Oman. His diction is characterised by a preponderance of motifs such as death, absence and exile.
As these words suggest, there’s a prevalent atmosphere of alienation in his poetry from the predominant discourses. The following are translations of poems from his elegiac collection: A Love Song for Laila Fakhru (Beirut 2012):
(1) Scattered around you
Are small corpses.
You weep
But the earth is earth:
Prophets it expels
Martyrs it stones.
(2) As if her blood
Had risen from the East,
Like a butterfly whose nectar death's fields suck.
(3) Even if the wind
Carried the silent whispers of the dead
To their first abodes,
Even if solitude left us standing before a tree
On whose boughs the clothes of the dead
Hung
I still remember you
As I remember my mother...
(4) Like a child that
Touches the river and cries:
My mother who's gone away
Will you be back again?
(5) Who will open the door
For my mother when she returns?
The angels, my love.
But she's travelled
Left us
She'll never return.
(6) Will I knock your tomb's door and cry?
Who will be there to hear East's call
After all its lovers turn to dust?
(7) Martyr
The passersby gathered
The ashes of his body
And left.
From the love that glowed in his eyes
There remained a warm blink
Like the drowsiness of a babe.
(8) The small, white love tree
Bent its boughs
Like an old dry river
Turns into a wasteland
After its lovers travelled to death.
(9) Turn to me
As you start your cry
Your bitter cry.
Say to me: I love you,
For you will travel later
To a warm, tender, deep death.
Every path leads to love
Every path leads to death.
(10) How sweet you are!
Like a stream descending
From some remote mountain.
But ...
Wait a little while,
Let me finish my song
And follow you...
(11) Like a tree
Dropping its fruits at last
After they ripen, you leave.
Sweet as you are
The river takes you
From its source to its mouth.
(12) We grew old
We died
Before your death
Your sweet death.
(13) Mothers of absence lull us to sleep
With songs of exodus
In a mountain the traveler can’t leave
Till after love shuts it eyes
And becomes but ruins.
(14) But
Who can stop you travelling to death?
The earth has already drawn you
To its roots
Embraced you
Like a mother hugging her babes
Before the rendezvous
With eternity's night
The deep night.
(15) A tranquil, serene beauty
Passed by our village at dawn,
It woke us up
It woke up our dead
And then left...
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