#50
Big Sur
Surveying the Pacific
from a cleft in the rock.
Ah sorrow, much sorrow.
Away from the city. And
there is still this wind.
A howling!
It resembles what.
And what does God resemble?
The look of a blind man.
One look all around
neither here nor else.
Ignorant of the world.
Before having created
one look into the crowd.
Jasmine, nothing more.
From the heights of the hills,
from these rocks the eye
weighing the Pacific. And.
…/…
#51
…/…
A passing whale
as if it isn’t god
under a rainbow.
It shoulders the sea.
Dragging the islands,
the gray gulls.
And the eye dreams
if it isn’t god
lost in the fog.
#52
A History
He says.
A blind man at the moment
of death recovers his sight.
Yes, he says,
I feel inspired too.
I feel my eyes open
too late to renounce it.
(In a state of inspiration
he lived in goodwill and bad
the end of his story.
And what he had seen.
The tomb overflowing, he
an unspeakable thing.)
He says this: it is empty.
This is my history, he says,
which I wanted to tell.
from L.A. Trip: A Novel in Verse by Mohammed Dib
-Translated from the French by Remy Wilkins