Shooting Sportsmen: poem by Golan Haji, translated from the Arabic by the author

Shooting Sportsmen is a poem by Golan Haji, which the poet himself translated from Arabic, published in issue 27 of The Wolf. It is one unbroken run of statements with no stanza breaks.

It opens with the aftermath of a killing on the street: minibus passengers who paid ten liras for their deaths that morning, a cupboard that buried sleepers, windowpanes tearing curtains, and a pool of blood on the asphalt. Then a group of men arrive, cancel their appointments and announce that no one is accused and all are sentenced. They close the pharmacies and bridges, block the entrances to cities and squares, and leave behind insomnia, a list of names, dust, bullets in a refrigerator door and a barrack inside a museum.

The next lines list who was taken: amateur actors, a physician, passers-by, musicians, bread-seekers, lottery vendors and goalkeepers. The men smash the sky, colour the tanks with its blood and murder the local madman along with a milk vendor and a parsley seller. They kill a window, the sister watching from it, the neighbours' cow and the streetlamp, and they crucify the carpenter, strangle the goldfinch and slaughter the singer.

They also burn barley spikes, books and bicycles, then lie down on playground grass and doze. The poem ends with two short sentences, one denying that these are images and one calling them the guardians of pictures.

Work

Shooting Sportsmen

Author

Golan Haji

Poems in this selection

• Shooting Sportsmen