|
|
in this issue
- Editorial
- SPECIAL FEATURE: Alice Guthrie's blog from Istanbul
- PROSE: The Third Thing by Sian Melangell Dafydd (Welsh)
- PROSE: Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí (Catalan)
- PROSE: 'Moonlit' by José Luís Peixoto (Portuguese)
- PROSE: What Happiness Is by Petri Tamminen (Finnish)
- PROSE: 'Madness came with the Rain' by Yanick Lahens (French / Haiti)
- PROSE: 'One Wish' by Mariasun Landa (Basque)
- POETRY: Tal Nitzan (Hebrew)
- POETRY: Petr Borkovec (Czech)
- POETRY: Arantxa Urretabizkaia (Basque)
- PROFILE: Catalan writer Quim Monzó
- INTERVIEW: Czech novelist Jáchym Topol
- PROFILE: Finnish contemporary literature: A Wealth of Voices
- PROFILE: Latvian Literature and the Publishing Scene
- ESSAY: Dark Sides, by Adrian Grima
POETRY: Arantxa Urretabizkaia (Basque)
Palm Trees
Gaza Borders
Sometimes you wish you lived
in a warmer country.
Right here, for example,
in this country
whose mere name fills your mouth
with the taste of fruit,
where palm trees
magnify the faintest flutter of air.
It seems to you
that rain eats away your colours
that sometimes you need warmth without surprises
a star that won’t hide.
Sometimes you wish you lived
in a warmer country.
But come a spring morning
in seeing the line of the horizon
swim amongst the soft clouds
you think, dreamingly,
that in this light there is no room for fundamentalism,
that is something that happens only in sunny climates.
And just then the clamour of thunder
whips the sky and earth.
© University of Wales, Aberystwyth 2002-2009
site by
CHL