lord
make room
for the rebellious one i am
for my angerless hands
for my selective loyalty
that betrays everything
except dreams and prayers
don’t be afraid
o lord
of my heart
with its intemperance
praise the barefooted
when they shine with their lies
it’s their only shelter
be shade for the one who sees you
and sun for the one who seeks you
lord
dwell within my stillness
until you and i
decipher the demeanour of the outcasts
attend to me o lord
until the tides bring in a new truth
rhythmic and strange
until we’re blind enough
for spume and mussel
and deaf enough
for wind and gulls
lord
i know
i’m only a messenger
let me unlock my message
without straying from my path
and leave a question behind
bind me to my times
from which i’ve escaped
and help this age
to endure me again
lord
when you arrive
we’ll be light
bread and water
the table is set and the door ajar
come and be seated among us
free me of the belief
that you’re only faithful from a distance
and speak with me
in the unharried speech of animals
who watch us from afar
with their unadulterated hunger
[These poems excerpted from 99 Psalms by SAID. © 2013 Preface, Afterword and English translation by Mark S. Burrows. Used by permission of Paraclete Press.]
SAID, a native of Iran, has lived in Germany since 1965. He has published eight volumes of poetry, several collections of essays, children’s books, and radio-plays; several of his books have appeared in English including Landscapes of a Distant Mother (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Widely acknowledged as one of the leading poets writing in Germany, he is the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including most recently the Hermann Kesten Medal of PEN-Germany, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the Literature Prize of the Society of Free German Authors. This volume first appeared as Psalmen, published by C. H. Beck Publishers (Munich, 2001).
Mark S. Burrows is currently professor of theology and literature at the University of Applied Sciences, Bochum (Germany). He previously taught, for twenty-five years, history and aesthetics in several graduate theological schools in the US. He has lectured widely in the United States, Australia, Asia, and Europe. He currently serves as Poetry Editor of the journal Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, and has published his own poems and translation, most recently, in Poetry, 91st Meridian, Presence, and Eremos. He recently published a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, Prayers of a Young Poet (Paraclete Press, 2013), and the poems that appear here are to be published in their entirety as 99 Psalms by the Iranian-German poet SAID (Paraclete Press, forthcoming in September, 2013). He is currently a writer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, where he is the recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship for Translation.