If we are always foreigners when one
of us walks across the Pont de Sully
[what is then foreigner?]
I can only wonder
It is not the color
the sun gave us,
a hue can’t
be a foreigner,
and the sun can’t
make someone
become a foreigner.
I can only wonder
Is it something that emerges from
our dark pupils while we
contemplate their strange buildings,
as if each of those constructions was
a tiny piece of the labyrinthine puzzle
that they stubbornly call “city”?
I can only wonder
But don’t pay much attention to my words,
it is only my [our] wandering soliloquy,
a conversations that I have with a wave
of borrowed voices that aren’t mine.
Because when I think about home
a soft whisper invades my memory
and I imagine that back in Essaouira
there is someone sitting at a table
awaiting my arrival to have dinner
while we talk about the years I spent abroad
seeking for an alley that I couldn’t find.
I can only wonder
Because a Parisian attic has nothing in common with the undulant floating of a fishing boat amidst the Atlantic Ocean, and as I keep walking through the labyrinthine streets of this endless city, where people are so proud of a tower with flickering lights, I can’t avoid pondering [while I look at the top of that famous tower] that “a poet living in an attic has nothing in common with a fisherman pulling with his arms the heavy fishing net with the catch of the day: [sardines] [mostly sardines] [only sardines].
And Paris [where you/he/she and I/We/Us are always foreigners] has nothing in common with a camel carrying tourists alongside the Moroccan shores while a few blonde young men practice windsurfing as if that ocean was their own garden.
And each night [before I turn off the lights of my rented room] when a voice from the other side of the Gibraltar Strait whispers straight into my ear that the catch of the day was better than the day before and that a plate of dried dates is still waiting for me on the table, I can only wonder, as if the voice was still whispering inside my ear, that life down there [in the Maghreb] is also a gift from god.
“Inshallah”
[is all I hear while I’m immersed in total darkness]
[in a rented room]
[in a land that is foreign because the wind blows like a jab in the stomach]
and all I can think about is if that table will be there the day I return to the place I call [home].
“Inshallah”
[but what does that mean while I’m
immersed in this foreign darkness?]
I can only wonder