Alaa Hassanien is an Egyptian poet, writer, journalist and director. Born in 1996 in Saudi Arabia to Egyptian parents, she graduated from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Cairo and has lived in France since 2022. She has published five books of poetry and short stories. In 2015, she was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Arabic Poetry in Paris.

I have written about the sea
About my desire to go far away
But I am far away already
There is nothing farther.
I've given up writing
As a man renounces love
Or as a woman abandons
her longing
to be loved.

As I try to let go of
sadness and hope.
But my heart won't stop beating
And with every beat I hear a moan.

Nothing matters
I'm tired of complaining
And day after day
The poetry of my heart fades
As if I'd never spoken poetry.
As if I had never been
Never felt sadness
Never written about the sea
Or remembered the sea
As if I had never drowned
And God had not reached out his blue hand
to my heart
And had never breathed out
A great painful breath,
Nor said, Here is another life.
So I went farther
Farther than the sand that slips through fingers
Farther than the trembling of the whole body
And I go on
But God did not look into my heart
Or if he did
He did not realise
How much exhaustion this heart has carried
How much weariness

Oh, the weariness.

My heart hardens.
And I mature
I lose the childish intuition
I lose the desire to write
As if tomorrow were my last day.

The days repeat themselves
My intuition deteriorates
And God moves away from my bed                                                                                                                   I no longer reach out to him
to hold him
As if I've grown accustomed to the absence
As if I'm tired of praying.

But who can stop the moans?
Where do the sobs come from?
From a bruise in my heart
On my leg
On my arm
Bruises everywhere
And the dead mother materialises in me
and I hear no voice
nor whisper.

I love a man who doesn't know me
A human being like me.
I don't idolize him
I don't believe he comes from a cloud
nor is he lost in the fog.

I love him and I know his weaknesses
I haven't touched him, I haven't felt him
But I see him
Coming every day
Walking before my eyes.

So much air separates us.
The air we both breathe.
But it doesn't soothe my restlessness
Nor diminish my childish passion
for death
Ah, death.

It's terrible to evoke childhood and death.
But my childhood was mixed up with it
I've known no other.
God only spoke to me when I was about to drown.
When I was underwater
His voice came from afar
His hand came
His divine intuition came.

Since then, I've been searching for God
My search for death
Since then, every man I've loved
has been God.

But I've stopped believing
My secret habit that I don't tell
others
I don't tell them that God is my lover everywhere
And that I'd like to hold his hand

I say I don't believe in him.
Who would believe in a ghost or an image
Who would believe in a black sheet covering the mirrors

Secretly, I do believe
Secretly, I pray
And recite prayers

Secretly, I say, "Lord, enlighten me if you exist."
Secretly, I sing, "Make me a beacon or a moon. Make me a beacon or a moon"
And I create my prayers
I raise them like a puppy
I water it like a cloud waters a thirsty
I am a beacon
I am a moon.

Who realises the last interpretation?
Nobody.

Nobody is there for me to say, 
"Look
Here are the fireflies passing by. "
No one is there to hear my voice
Not even God
Not even the man I loved.

I'm looking for an end to my days
that feels like me
Like jumping out the window
for a cloud to catch me
Like falling off a bridge
for two arms to catch me.

I'm looking to turn the page
And I don't want to
live
Or die
I'm like a stone stumbling on the road.

Without dreams I end the last days
Without pleasure
With gentleness I shelter
In sweet company

With days that are neither black
Nor white

With the memory of my cats
who died
and perhaps became a lemon tree.

In memory, I avoid the days
As if I had reached the end of the night.
To the white thread
and the black thread
and separated them.

The night is so close
A mouth for endings over my corpse
Two loving arms contemplating
The memory of touch
A familiar hand closes the eyelids

And I know I won't live long
And I rejoice
And I cry
Is it blood?
Is it water?
Is it a river in which I've drowned without caring?

How far away the days are
How close the sorrows are
How strange these marks on the road are

Maybe in the beginning they were people
Maybe in the beginning I was a stone.