Exodus from Ireland

Marwan Makhoul

Hindi translation by Richa Nagar | Urdu translation by Abdul Aijaz & Gwendolyn Kirk

I arrived in Ireland and my coat cried out:
You’ve gone abroad, my friend, but left me at home!
Perhaps it was an omen,
for missiles were embracing over my family
in Galilee, when I weakened and accepted Annemarie’s invitation.
I came to read my poems, here, to ones far away,
poems that at first hearing made the local translator
betray them and sob.
Perhaps they reminded him of his grandfather
who eluded oppression before me
a century ago until he gained liberation
and independence.

I grew up very sensitive to the cold
my mother is the one to blame
rushing over to wrap me up whenever
she heard the slightest rumble of thunder.
On the three-day trip whenever
they offered me a break between readings,
I would flee to the shops of Dublin,
where there’s no shortage of
luxury brands, whose prices made me dizzy
so I hurried back to the next reading
to get my circulation going and calm down.
That, my family in Galilee, is how I spent my trip
feeling the warmth of those around me
– I mean those demonstrating to stop the war –
their gasps blanketing me as if they were cattle
over the manger where I was an envoy sent by a Jesus
believing like me in the poem.

Ireland, you were closer to me than myself.
I forgot the cold that returned with my return,
the day I bought a coat in Frankfurt airport, ice-cold
like Germany’s stance on a holocaust raising groans of pain
from those displaced from north of Gaza to south of Gaza
to a camp being immolated right now
on another final frontier in Rafah.
Thank you, Ireland
and damn those who apologize for the distant past
while they turn a blind eye to my present, whose future
is a shame on those like them, but I am not going away
and so the shame will never go away.

Translated into English by Raphael Cohen