Selected Poem: Not About Love (Abdul Rahim Abu Zikra)
28 June, 2020
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) – Today’s selected poem was also written by the Sudanese poet Abdul Rahim Abu Zikra. Abu Zikra was known for his high sensitivity and yearning for an ideal world away from the harsh surrounding realities of life. .orn in 1943, Abu Zikra ended his own life when he jumped from a window out of the 13 floor of the Russian Sciences Academy, Moscow, in October 1989.
He graduated from the University of Khartoum, Faculty of Arts, Department of Russian language and Literature. He obtained his PhD in Russian language and literature, Antoine Chekov writings and translations in particular, in 1987. He was known to be highly talented in translation, literary writings and journalism.
He equally was known to have excelled in his academic performance, which was recognized by his Russian professors and at the University of Khartoum where he worked as lecturer.
Not About Love
I have a strange sky
I contemplate in privacy
Rock in evening, distracted
Sing in pretty songs
With my hoarse voice, not a singer’s voice
I say to it, rasping:
O my refuge from intense heat and severe cold,
Vehicle of the rising sun that moves across your strange plain,
Across your spacious, invincible steppes, we gaze….
You alone know
Why we both wade through seas
Pass between the distant stars,
Love those whose heads are held high
And the hopes we have, as yet, not realized
And the eyes swirling
In boldness and love and menacing alienation
We love the ships bolting high seas
And the border posts and man’s lands
Traveling across coarse land descending on meteors
Besieged by the fire under the ancient boundaries
We rise rubbing our faces in the coming years in our steps
It tightens its killing claws
O! My sky, the smoke!
The smoke has dulled our impulses a fifth wall is in place
Carrion is thick in the wind
Heavens, love and scented air
Don’t exist here…. Beholds!
Whenever we accept the earth in our hearts
It becomes on exile for us,
For our longings
*** The poem has been translated from Arabic by Alsir Khidir and published in his book "Modern Sudanese Poetry (Anthology and Appraisal)"
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