By Adonis, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
A coffin that wears the face of a child,
a book
written inside the guts of a crow,
a beast trudging forward, holding a flower,
a stone
breathing inside the lungs of a madman.
This is it.
This is the twentieth century.
Adonis was born in Al Qassabin, Syria, in 1930. He is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry.