An Entity Unknown By: Mohamed Hamad- Translated From Arabic

Text by: Mohamed Hamad

Translated by: Mustafa Mudathir

There is a tiny mystery;
an entity unknown

that hymenates our souls

for reasons undisclosed

with a plasticine of thinness

a sleazy film of boredom

to blunt our insistence

in dealing with existence.

And verily those same songs, 

enchanted as they are

that ornament affect, the deepest and inmost,

are turned to mere phonations

that tend to bore at most.

The things you sought with passion

are now dispelled around you

devoid of early value, or heavily under-rationed.

You like it, oh! no more,

the stretching on your bed

Nor do you like rising

and nothing is surprising.

Your cup of tea, whose edges

are occupied with white,

fitly tight but slight

arrangements of foam

in a faintly soaring vapor

is sipped with only half the usual kind of fervor.

With both your lungs employed

you only get some faint amount of air.

And every time you feel that

filament on your soul,

it gets the thicker and firmer.

I know it is illusory.

It surely doesn't exist.

But can this ever resist

the working of that

tiny, unidentified being

wrapping my soul

in a filament, a flimsy membrane,

once and again and again.