Penniless
Penniless I live at a checkpoint,
trifles make me happy,
like when a whole day passes without me
seeing a single soldier,
his bored yawning.
There I write my new novel
about the butcher
who wanted to be a violinist,
mean and vulgar,
his hands failed him, favoured
the sharp glistening blades.
You can imagine how gloomy it can be
to be destitute, penniless,
to live at a checkpoint,
to know happiness
in trifles, skipping a loquacious poet’s turn
in line, or passing wiped out
day labourers with banana sacks
on their backs, guava bags,
and containers of Tnuva milk.
I’m destitute. For years
I’ve been living in a tomb
but have seen neither angel nor devil,
just more than my share of sleepy soldiers.
From You Can Be the Last Leaf by Maya Abu-Alhayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2022). Translation copyright © 2022 Fady Joudah. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.
Fady Joudah has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston with his wife and children, where he practices internal medicine.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the author of four poetry collections, four novels, and several books for children. Her writing has been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, and Korean. She is the editor of The Book of Ramallah (Comma Press, 2021) and director of the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit, West Bank, Palestine. She currently lives in Jerusalem with her husband and children. Her selected poems from 2006 to 2021, You Can Be the Last Leaf, are forthcoming from Milkweed Books in 2022, translated by Fady Joudah.
