more from "The Gift of Emptyness"

Here are a few more translations from Mohammed Bennis’s collection Le Don du Vide:

RINGS

Anchor the air to the rings of the doors
or to the ruins of the praises
The sea fulfills you
Your depth is blue
Your hand wet
is desire
or else
you do not exist

* * *

IMPURITY

This is my body I meet it
it emerges wet from the pure thing
and from the hollow of the words
I see myself doing my ablutions
with a haunted silence
with an ecstatic impurity
The blemishes dissolve
in the water of desire
A nothingness
that told me Do not write
withdraws

* * *

TRANCE

Majestic worry
then shadow jets
migration
that fixes itself in the pure word
Here is the child surprised
by its own secret
Alone
he mumbles the shadows
then abandons the trance
to its fate
and falls asleep

* * *

HER

Pitched tent
and night around Her
an enclosure of dust

The breeze of moments
continues to create the horizon
A shiver firms up
in the entrails and now the brilliance
effaces itself so that children and
vertigo may be united

Who gave birth to these palmtrees
which ancestors have the organs
invited to the gathering

A dissident blood
pushes forgetfulness of self to extremes
between storms
and vapors

* * *

TWIN

This dead will remain unknown
by the nomad cloud
this my twin
no night
by the crawling inlays
will understand him

He plays at birds
that peck his lips
Onto his body
throw no flowers
at the dream’s bottom
Listen to him

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