Yahia Lababidi

 

Yahia Lababidi is an internationally published aphorist, poet, and essayist, with work appearing in such publications as World Literature Today, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Rain Taxi, and Philosophy Now. His latest book is the critically acclaimed new essay collection Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing. His Signposts to Elsewheres selected as a 2008 Book of the Year by The Independent (UK). Lababidi’s work has appeared in several anthologies, including the best-selling Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. His writing has been translated into Arabic, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, and Italian. (updated 12/2010)

Read Alex Stein’s “The Prayer of Attention: A Conversation with Yahia Lababidi,” an AGNI Online interview excerpted in Harper’s Magazine’s “Links”

Source: http://www.bu.edu/agni/authors/Y/Yahia-Lababidi.html

 

Words 

Words are like days:
coloring books or pickpockets,
signposts or scratching posts,
fakirs over hot coals.

Certain words must be earned
just as emotions are suffered
before they can be uttered
- clean as a kept promise.

Words as witnesses
testifying their truths
squalid or rarefied
inevitable, irrefutable.

But, words must not carry
more than they can 
it’s not good for their backs
or their reputations.

For, whether they dance alone
or with an invisible partner,
every word is a cosmos 
dissolving the inarticulate

 

If 

If there were more than one of me
I'd shave my head and grow my beard
I'd be a Doctor of Theology 

In great coat of myth, impermeable to ridicule
I'd raise my voice and sing
hymns to the Unknown god 

Another me would come undone voluptuously
submit to possessions, deliriously
mate with night in vicious delight 

I would be, in a word, unspeakable
indulge an appetite artistically criminal
gloriously indifferent to utter: ruin! 

Yet another me would take to stage
part animal, part angel in improbable outfit
strike ecstatic pose and fuse with masses 

Or perhaps, at last, renounce words and self
occupy an eye, to better see
in silent awe, peripherally 

But, there is only this ambitious pen, and playpen
fencing a mass of miscarriages
trembling from time in unquiet blood 

And I, with reluctant fidelity, am guardian
looking over the restless, violent lot
for fear of fratricide


What is to Give Light

Inspired by the Egyptian revolution, 2011

What is to give light must endure
burning, a man once said
Another man became the matchstick
that set a nation aflame

But fire, and its appetite, cannot be
calculated, like freedom
Injustice and desperation make men
combustible, like dry wood

When words lose their meaning
and an entire people their voice --
so they can neither laugh nor scream --
death and life begin to taste the same

From Tunis, to Egypt, to Lebanon to Yemen
the light from a burning man proved catching
And those with nothing to lose, or offer, but bodies
fanned the embers of their hopes into a blazing dream.

 


 

Recommended books by Lababidi (check here to learn more)