What if the gallows were not an instrument of death, but a condition of life: the endless waiting for what may never arrive?
In The Gallows, Jordanian poet Ali Taha Alnobani recasts a familiar image of execution as a metaphor for suspended existence. The speaker plants the horizon with colors, names, and dreams, yet arrives too late to encounter what was promised. Even the fragrance of a beloved becomes inaccessible.
Present, Yet Recorded as Absent
One of the poem's central paradoxes is the person who arrives but is entered as absent in every register. The image works on two levels: it evokes social and institutional exclusion, while also suggesting the existential pain of being physically present without fully participating in life. Logic and arithmetic themselves seem to protest the contradiction.
When the Rule Becomes a Gallows
In the final movement, the gallows becomes a foolish metrical foot ruling over a mad poem. A small unit of poetic order assumes power over the whole imaginative work. The image also invites a broader reading of arbitrary systems that constrain human life. Lightning arrives without thunder; thunder comes without rain. The signs of fulfillment appear, but fulfillment does not follow.
These contradictions remain open rather than resolved. The poem's gallows is neither simply death nor simply life, but an oppressive interval between expectation and experience.
The Gallows
Ali Taha Alnobani
The gallows is not a rope,
not death,
nor life.
It is waiting for what may never come,
even if you plant the horizon with colors,
and names,
and dreams.
It is the story of someone who arrived too late
and found himself with a cold
instead of his beloved's fragrance.
It is the story of someone who arrived
yet was recorded as absent
in every register,
until even the rules of logic and arithmetic
began to grumble about him.
The gallows is a foolish metrical foot
ruling over a mad poem.
It is lightning without thunder,
and thunder without rain.
It is a monotonous life
crouching inside the cloak of death.
Read The Gallows
Wattpad: The Gallows — English poem
Booksie: The Gallows by Ali Taha Alnobani
Original Arabic: المشنقة ليست حبلا — Qafiyah
Other selected poems: A Letter to Freedom · Another Street
Originally written in Arabic by Ali Taha Alnobani. The English translation was prepared with AI assistance and subsequently reviewed, revised, and edited by the author to preserve the poem's meaning, imagery, and literary voice. Cover artwork generated with AI.
Poem © Ali Taha Alnobani. All rights reserved. Introductory literary commentary by THE BIRD.
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