STATIONERS’ POETRY BOOK SOCIETY WEEKLY POEM - NUMBER 7
4 JUNE 2020
Carcanet Press have given us permission to use this poem, Life, from Beyond the Barbed Wire by Abdellatif Laâbi as our seventh lock down poem suggested by the Poetry Book Society. Members will find it in their own area of the website and should log in and read it there along with all sorts of other items pertinent to the lock down!
Life
It’s enough I woke up
the sun to my right
the moon to my left
and that I walked
From my mother’s womb
to the threshold of this century
Life
It’s enough I tasted this fruit
I wrote about what I witnessed
I never kept quiet about the horrors
I did all I could
and everything I took, I gave over to love
Life
is nothing short of a miracle
that nobody sees
O wounded body
wounded soul
Admit you’ve been happy
Just between us
admit it
Published by kind permission of Carcanet Press, from Beyond the Barbed Wire by Abdellatif Laâbi (2016), translated by André Naffis-Sahely. Available to order here with 25% off for PBS Members.
Written by Abdellatif Laâbi, one of Morocco’s leading poets who was a political prisoner in the 1970s, this moving poem captures the “miracle” and “horror” of life. It's included in his career spanning selected works, Beyond the Barbed Wire, which features several poems from his time in prison. 'Life' holds a prescient resonance in our new locked-down lives and offers a timely reminder of the need to bear witness and appreciate happiness.
Abdellatif Laâbi was born in Fez, Morocco in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles, or Breaths, a widely influential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Now living in France, Laâbi’s recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Collected Poems in 2009, and the Académie française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011.
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Photo: Ji-Elle