Another Street | A Surrealist Poem by Ali Taha Alnobani

Another Street — a poem by Ali Taha Alnobani

What happens when some people appear to inherit radiance, privilege, and certainty, while others must keep searching for a place in the world?

In Another Street, Jordanian poet Ali Taha Alnobani leads the reader through a shifting landscape of enchanted vehicles, ancient structures, a commanding priest, fractured images of happiness, and streets that never quite become a home. The poem moves through surreal scenes without surrendering their ambiguity to a single explanation.

Privilege, belief, and the search for justice

The opening figure travels in splendor, surrounded by whiteness, gold, and smiles. His apparent serenity contrasts with a speaker who cannot settle into the world offered to him. This contrast raises questions not only about wealth and power, but also about the unequal conditions into which human beings arrive: who assigns their places, and what might justice mean within such an arrangement?

The poem also explores the power of language. A priest points toward the void and demands imitation; elsewhere, the living and the dead pour words over objects until those objects appear luminous. Such images invite reflection on the ways authority can shape what people are asked to believe. Yet the poem leaves room for genuine longing alongside false promises. Its speaker does not replace one absolute certainty with another. He simply admits: “I was not certain.”

Another street, another possibility

Repeated departures give the poem its restless rhythm. Each street seems to promise another way of living, but each also brings new forms of estrangement. Images return in altered forms: the oil and canvas of the opening become, at the end, a canvas fleeing its oil. The final smile recalls the first, leaving the distance between the privileged traveler and the searching speaker unresolved.

Originally written in Arabic, Another Street is the title poem of Alnobani's poetry collection شارع آخر. The English version below preserves the poem's unusual imagery, recurring phrases, and open philosophical questions.

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Another Street

Ali Taha Alnobani

English version revised and edited by the author

He passed through here. Whiteness shimmered from his enchanted vehicle. God was beside him. Gold emerging from the gleam of glass, oil on canvas, a pattern upon a butterfly’s wing. He was smiling. The leather of the soft seats around him— he was smiling. And the rays of the sun, too, were smiling. *** Departure was an even harsher rebuke to the conscience, and the beautiful flowers were a factory of pain. *** There is another street where the soul mews like an ancient frame constricted by distance, teeming with songs, while from its windows drift the vapors of love and women. *** The timeworn priest, his beard like a cloud in the twilight of sunset, released the birds from his domed tower, coiled like a serpent and rolled across the ice. He pointed toward the void: “Try to imitate me.” I stared at my scattered cotton. I was not certain. And I found myself seeking refuge in flight to another street. *** I saw a baby in swaddling cloth, peeing on the story of arrival. Smoke was rising in the forest of weeping and laughter. And I was hungry. So I wrenched from my throat a bundle of choking anguish and elegies. Among them I saw the goddess of beauty and happiness. Her only leg was like a pale chimney. So I closed my eyes and fled to another street. *** I saw them together, the living and the dead. They were gathering stones, pouring words over their things, making them appear luminous. But at the first touch of darkness, those things shed their masks and fell asleep in the dull windows. They said: “Come, let us plant glasses in the harbors of departure, perhaps we may glow like the stars.” I was not certain. And I fled to another street, without space or trees, a canvas that fled its oil. And the one who passed by there, from another planet, was smiling. ***

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Read the poem and explore more

Wattpad: Another Street — English edition

Original Arabic: شارع آخر — موقع الديوان

Another selected poem: Burning Colors · The Field and the Rabbits

Poem © Ali Taha Alnobani. The introductory literary commentary is by THE BIRD. The English poem is presented as an author-revised version of the Arabic original.