The law and the depth

We exchange the tips of our nerves daily for tomatoes and cabbages.

Truth is a match that continues in time despite us.

We get a glimpse of God.

It opens and repurposes us.

The days are touched by the law.

Surrounded by very precise acts of undoing, we still go where the river stopped intersecting with ourselves.

There is the so called depth of us, that we would like to explore, looking for a heavenly creature within.

All we have inside is so many metaphors to choose from.

The thoughts of our best thinkers didn’t envelope us after all. We are anomalous.
The law touches us often and flattens us.

On the pragmatism of soccer

The fluctuation of thoughts
As the busy streets retract their meaning
The world should be touched differently
Love is possibly about making sense of things

The activities I did repetitively in order to stay alive
Stopped helping
And I spent hours without breath
Typically I go to bars carrying heavy books of math
The moment I enter
Some soccer team scores a penalty on TV
Now everybody in the bar is upset
I go over the ten commandments with them
And a few differential equations to give the illusion of order
In truth I followed only some of the commandments
They didn’t seem to work

The magnitude of loss

Regarding the problem of enjoyment
Adding love to the class struggle
As our labour goes unpaid
And as we live without music
There are piles of nothings
Defying God’s words
Life being a small tragedy
In the small ghettos of the universe

The bipolar overtime

How about going back thirty years
Reading the same books
Falling in love with the same women
Walking the same streets
Where life got troubled one event after another
Retrieving my old taste for street food
And making sense of my oscillating mind
An engineering book here, a poetry book there, and occasionally,
a novel
This is how I will welcome growing old
Exercising my heart daily in preparation for angels
Not every angel is terrifying

Walking around in the city

Reworking the world
Half-consciously
Tourists take pictures
The city is fragile
Except for the bookstores
I am at the same places
I was taken to in childhood
Yet nostalgia doesn’t kick in
Not even a dash of melancholy

Recovering
The bare minimum of life
Is what follows several sleepless nights
Beware of madness
Hidden layers under layers
Within your cells
There is a juice in life
If you look up a little
To some tree
Or a loved one

—

Six Poems by Maged Zaher is featured in Issue 3.41 (Summer 2020). To read the piece in its entirety purchase a print copy or view it digitally for free here.