Mohammad Ahmad
06-11-2025, 04:35 PM
Hello
I found the following poem which is written by : Bruce Bond -the American poet \ Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, 1997-2015
I wonder how the poem could tell about Mongol invading Baghdad in the very ancient centuries.
It is clear, the poem uses words and expressions refer to that incident
I thought with myself, perhaps it is translated poem, but how much I searched, I didn't find any result.
Then the poet entitled his poem " ink " which is a sign when Mongol shattered books and threw in Tigris River, and by all accounts, they made from that books a bridge on the river to cross by. Many things in the poem tell me that the occasion is that occasion ?
Please, can anyone here or there, and especially those who are wide-minded in literature, support my issue ?
Of course, it is very easy for me to translate the poem into Arabic, but let me wait your responses
Ink
When, in the dark ages of the East,
the Mongols took the heart of the city
and poured in, room after room, to cut
a path through the bodies in their way,
they loaded up the illuminated books,
the many wildflowers of Islam hand-sewn,
penned, edged in gold, and made of them
a bridge across the Tigris, shaky at best,
to lead men from the spoils of their labor.
This is the story of the House of Wisdom,
how centuries gathered there to pool
the gems of medicine and metaphysics,
until the river took them, leaving us
the ache of knowing just enough to ache.
If history repeats, it does so without us.
It returns the way a criminal returns,
or a tongue to the space that was a tooth.
When the bodies of the philosophers
broke the surface, they floated here and there,
littering the shore, their wounds drained
into the current, to stain the glass
not red exactly, in spite of what you hear,
but rust, a fading scar of dirt and iron.
The greatness of a city is how it kneels
near the water, to beat its laundry there,
or flood the fields in their season, to carry
what: fennel, flax, cinnamon, a scholar.
Beyond the necessary, a river draws
the mourner toward something she cannot find—
it helps her nonetheless—or the believer
toward reconciliation with her god.
If we hear there rumors of water going
on without end, it is nonetheless loss
that speaks. What book would not be a bridge.
Or the grave of some sad misconception.
Somewhere still there is a volume that says
what the river of the dead cannot,
that once a library fell into the Tigris,
and these waters, that are a widow's friend,
ran black with ink, mile after mile.
I found the following poem which is written by : Bruce Bond -the American poet \ Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, 1997-2015
I wonder how the poem could tell about Mongol invading Baghdad in the very ancient centuries.
It is clear, the poem uses words and expressions refer to that incident
I thought with myself, perhaps it is translated poem, but how much I searched, I didn't find any result.
Then the poet entitled his poem " ink " which is a sign when Mongol shattered books and threw in Tigris River, and by all accounts, they made from that books a bridge on the river to cross by. Many things in the poem tell me that the occasion is that occasion ?
Please, can anyone here or there, and especially those who are wide-minded in literature, support my issue ?
Of course, it is very easy for me to translate the poem into Arabic, but let me wait your responses
Ink
When, in the dark ages of the East,
the Mongols took the heart of the city
and poured in, room after room, to cut
a path through the bodies in their way,
they loaded up the illuminated books,
the many wildflowers of Islam hand-sewn,
penned, edged in gold, and made of them
a bridge across the Tigris, shaky at best,
to lead men from the spoils of their labor.
This is the story of the House of Wisdom,
how centuries gathered there to pool
the gems of medicine and metaphysics,
until the river took them, leaving us
the ache of knowing just enough to ache.
If history repeats, it does so without us.
It returns the way a criminal returns,
or a tongue to the space that was a tooth.
When the bodies of the philosophers
broke the surface, they floated here and there,
littering the shore, their wounds drained
into the current, to stain the glass
not red exactly, in spite of what you hear,
but rust, a fading scar of dirt and iron.
The greatness of a city is how it kneels
near the water, to beat its laundry there,
or flood the fields in their season, to carry
what: fennel, flax, cinnamon, a scholar.
Beyond the necessary, a river draws
the mourner toward something she cannot find—
it helps her nonetheless—or the believer
toward reconciliation with her god.
If we hear there rumors of water going
on without end, it is nonetheless loss
that speaks. What book would not be a bridge.
Or the grave of some sad misconception.
Somewhere still there is a volume that says
what the river of the dead cannot,
that once a library fell into the Tigris,
and these waters, that are a widow's friend,
ran black with ink, mile after mile.