Selected Poem: Man’s Time of Loss (Aalim Abbas)
17 January, 2021
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - Aalim Abbas is one of the prominent contemporary Sudanese poets. He was born in al Fashir, Darfur, in 1948 and graduated in the Faculty of Sharia and Law, Omdurman Islamic University, in 1974. He has won the Republic Order for Arts in the 1971 Cultural Festival and the first prize in the Sudanese youth poets competition in 1973.
Aalim has published a number of poetry books. He is currently the Secretary General of the National Council for the Promotion of Culture and Arts.
Following is an example of his early poems:
Man’s Time of Loss
Betwixt one vision and another
Rise the cloud of horror unveiled
Encamped in utter tragedy
The arms of disfigurement shudder
And its legs grow as the galantine,
Black trees bearing bitter fruit
And thorns imploring touch of one caught
Betwixt one vision and another
The threads of comedy entangle.
In a time unjust
You denied an offering hand
But when you are chaste
The greatest of hungers survive.
If you do not eat of your dead brother’s flesh,
Or lie commit adultery or the like you will be in exile, written off if not.
They made one face
For the worshipped creator,
But one hundred, one thousands, one million face
In the laboratories of ignorance.
Short wisdom embraced by his
They are:
“What can a slave do when hunger pains but consume his God?”
Betwixt one vision and another
The serpent of reality twists
About my neck
Telling me to begin anew without down pulling
Roots or history
So that I might possess the world.
What a world…!
A chance remembrance splits the pearl of consciousness
And sends it reeling.
The beast, this earth, rises to gnaw away
At my stick, upon which I rest
This burden of me and down I falls.
Death.
The river flowing beneath me
And the winds in abundance around me yield to my wish.
The birds as my soldiers, love as my king.
It comes but once until doom’s day:
Kingship, power, wonder and despair.
When I die in my niche I shall ever remain,
Until that beast, this earth rises to gnaw my stick
On which I rest this deadness.
*** The poem was first published in “Modern Sudanese Poetry” (Anthology and Appraisal), selected and translated by El Sir Khidir, 2017.
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