Merchant, keep your attar of roses, your ambers, your oud, your myrrh and sandalwood. I need nothing but this dust palmed in my hand’s cup like a coin, like a mustard seed, like a rusted key. I need no more than this, this earth that isn’t earth, but breath, the exhalation of a living city, the song of a flute-boned woman, air and marrow on her lips. This dust, shaken from a drum, a door opening, a girl’s heel on stone steps, this dust like powdered cinnamon, I would wear as other girls wear jasmine and lilies, that a child with seafoam eyes and dusky skin might cry, there goes a girl with seven thousand years at the hollow of her throat, there goes a girl who opens her mouth to pour caravans, mamelukes, a mongolian horde from lips that know less of roses than of temples in the rising sun! Damascus, Dimashq is a song I sing to myself. I would find where she keeps her mouth, meet it with mine, press my hand against her palm and see if our fingers match. She is the sound, the feel of coins shaken in a cup, of dice, the alabaster clap of knight claiming rook, of kings castling — she is the clamour of tambourines and dirbakki, nays sighing, qanouns musing, the complaint of you merchants with spice-lined hands, and there is dust in her laughter. I would drink it, dry my tongue with this noise, these narrow streets, until she is a parched pain in my throat, a thorned rose growing outwards from my belly’s pit, aching fragrance into my lungs. I need no other. I would spill attar from my eyes, mix her dust with my salt, steep my fingers in her stone and raise them to my lips.
Song for an Ancient City, Amal El-Mohtar
