Selected Poems in English · An editorial introduction by THE BIRD
What happens when tomorrow arrives without the hope it once promised? In A Bouquet of Tales of Lostness, Jordanian poet Ali Taha Alnobani gathers ten interwoven poetic voices at the edge of a river, where travelers discover that the most painful estrangement can occur without ever leaving home.
A dust-covered boy asks whether Tomorrow has come. An old man recalls a child who became a tree. A bewildered girl loses her wooden toy, misses her railway station, and confronts a world where even familiar faces have been altered. A young man hears a news bulletin give way to a shattered clock. Their journeys mingle without resolving into a single, reassuring account.
First published in Arabic in the 2021 collection The Field and the Rabbits (الحقل والأرانب), issued by the Jordanian Ministry of Culture, the poem explores dislocated time, the loss of language, the deformation of human relationships by power, and a countervailing longing for reunion with nature. The English version below was revised and edited by the poet, preserving the deliberate strangeness of his imagery.
Ali Taha Alnobani
(1)
A caravan's distance from estrangement,
we drank the last pill of boredom.
We drew our talismans
upon the memory of the sands.
The boy whose face was smeared with dust said:
Has "Tomorrow" come?
And if so...
Why do the ears of wheat weep,
and the streets,
and the schools?
Why do the vineyards groan
beneath the guillotine of pain?
(2)
The old man, bristling with streams and holes, said:
Tomorrow has come,
but he has lost the bride
who tends his hair.
He grew hungry along the road
and ate nothing
but a thread of the sun's blaze.
And I—
I do not know how I returned.
I was with another child
who loved me very much,
and in an instant
he became a tree.
From it I plucked
a black autumn tale,
and found myself here.
Perhaps if I swim in the river once again,
I will return to you, my son.
(3)
I said to them:
At first,
I saw the river
as a gleaming sheet of steel.
Ants marched across it in swarms,
without telling a story.
I thought I had gone deaf,
until the crows came
from the Valley of Turtles.
They cawed so long
that I forgot the letters,
and I cawed like them:
Caw, caw, caw.
Caw, caw.
Caaaaaaaaaw.
And my story changed.
I touched my face
but could not find it.
And I swam through the steel.
(4)
The young man in the gray hat said:
I was in my vehicle.
The announcer was talking
about the weather,
when suddenly his voice began to tremble.
He said:
"From today onward,
the news bulletin
will be discontinued."
I stopped my vehicle.
The remains of my companions
flew apart at the clock in the square.
I heard the letters groaning,
one by one,
at the clock in the square.
The hands of the clock fled
into another structure,
taking shape like a cloud in the ashes.
A bewitched flash stung us all.
And I found myself beside this river,
restlessly shifting among the fragments,
like an ancient priest who could find no fire
with which to set the sky ablaze.
(5)
The old man leapt into the river,
and the waters turned green around him.
The bewildered girl said,
sitting among the rocks:
"Once, I jumped in as he did.
I had nothing with me
but a wooden toy,
with astonishment on its face
and a desire to journey onward.
Then I found myself here,
without my toy,
walking with the caravan,
without waiting,
sometimes like a scorpion,
sometimes like a beautiful cat.
But my memory
melted into the waters
like a salty tear."
(6)
A caravan's distance from estrangement,
I saw the water wet with songs.
I drank until my eyes bulged.
And when I tried to sing,
the rains gathered me
into their droplets
and hurled me toward the stars.
Along the way,
I feared I would burn,
but they were radiant and cold,
like a jewel.
I filled my eyes with their sound
and went on in a deep stupor,
until I found myself here,
like a winged wound
on the bank of the blaze.
(7)
The bewildered girl said:
I thought he was my beloved.
And by chance,
I fell asleep on the train.
I dreamed I was planting children on the moon,
and they sprouted, smiling.
Their giggles flowed
like light.
But I passed my station
without knowing it,
and found a single white hair.
I offered it to the travelers
so they might fashion from it
a more truthful encounter.
And I found myself here,
beside this river,
my hands utterly empty.
(8)
The boy said,
washing his face in the river:
I wish I had known
the right times.
The rains came
after the crops had died.
They closed the door
when I came to know my father.
And when I stole a book,
the letters changed their shapes.
What does the clock want from me?
How can I become one
with madness?
(9)
The bewildered girl said:
When I stepped off the train,
the police surrounded me.
Among them was a face
that looked like my beloved's,
yet it was hard as stone,
silent as a coffin,
small as a louse.
They changed my name,
my face,
and my voice.
Then they gave me a mirror
and released me into the void.
I saw my mother in the void,
tender,
but broken.
Beautiful,
but she did not recognize me.
(10)
A caravan's distance from estrangement,
I saw the crowd surrounding the walls.
The orator stood upon the wooden stage
and delivered his words,
heavy as a hammer.
The policeman said:
"I, too, have lost my batons and weapons.
There was no one inside the walls
except an unlucky child
and a foolish woman."
I tried to recognize
the faces of my friends,
the scent of oil and olives,
the color of night
in Salma's braid.
But the orator was inflamed with enthusiasm,
and released the crows from their cages.
And we began to caw:
Caw... caw.
Caw.
Caaaaaaaaaw.
The river has changed its course,
and let us wait for the hands of the clock.
Literary reflection · THE BIRD
When Voices Become Caws: Ten Tales of Existential Estrangement
The distance of a caravan. The recurring line “A caravan’s distance from estrangement” measures an inner condition in terms of an outward journey. The poet’s idea of estrangement is not simply exile from a homeland; it is the unsettling possibility of feeling alien even among one’s family, in one’s own familiar surroundings. The caravan, the river, the train and the missed station give visible form to that inward displacement.
Tomorrow stripped of its promises. The boy’s question—has Tomorrow come?—is answered by an old man who imagines Tomorrow as a traveler who has lost his bride. The bride evokes the beauty and hope the future once seemed to offer. Tomorrow arrives, but without the life that made its arrival desirable. Even the “last pill of boredom” suggests that a cruelly repetitive present may be ending, while leaving the nature of what comes next uncertain.
Lost letters, broken encounters. In the third movement, crows cry until the speaker forgets the letters of language and can no longer find his own face. In the last movement, after an orator releases crows from cages, the entire crowd begins to caw. The shift from “I” to “we” is crucial: people still make sounds and may believe they understand one another, yet authentic communication has broken down. In some Arab cultural traditions the crow’s call is also associated with ill omens, an undertone preserved by the recurring sound, “Caw.”
The white hair as a gift. The bewildered traveler dreams of planting children on the moon; then she discovers that she has missed her station and found a single white hair. Like a growth ring within a tree, the hair holds a trace of time lost in the search for love and happiness. She gives it to fellow travelers so they might fashion “a more truthful encounter”—a gesture of sacrifice, hard-earned knowledge and faith that human beings can invent better ways of reaching one another.
Power’s deformation of the human. The face resembling the girl’s beloved belongs to someone whose humanity has been altered by authority. The police change her name, face and voice, then hand her a mirror. In the final movement, even the policeman speaks from a damaged interior: he has lost his weapons yet continues to describe a child and a woman through the language of contempt. The poem portrays not only people oppressed by power, but also people diminished by their absorption into its speech.
Nature and the winged wound. Elsewhere the poem imagines “the water wet with songs”: a meeting of human expression and the natural world. Rain gathers the speaker into droplets and carries him toward cold, luminous stars. This yearning to dissolve into the larger body of nature invites a reading alongside Sufi reflections on the unity of existence, including those associated with Ibn Arabi, without requiring any single doctrinal interpretation. The speaker remains wounded, but the wound has wings; suffering does not extinguish the capacity to dream of reunion.
Across the ten movements, lostness is therefore more than a failure to find one’s way. It is the loss of innocence, of the trustworthy word, of time and recognition—and the persistent desire to recover contact with others, with nature and with the self. The ending offers no easy resolution: the river has changed its course, and the voices can only wait for the hands of the clock.
Original Arabic poem: «باقة من حكايات التيه». First published in الحقل والأرانب (The Field and the Rabbits), Jordanian Ministry of Culture, 2021.
Read the original Arabic poem on Al-Diwan · Read the English poem on Wattpad
© Ali Taha Alnobani. All rights reserved.
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