Richard Berengarten
FALLING
(in a Pit)
(29)
坎
From Changing
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water water
Way down
If all ways are
gifts, named or unnamed,
downwards may yield
dark treasure,
though it is called
unnameable, being
so swift sweep-
ing in arrival, no
recognizance can
prepare the heart
for batterings there
to be endured.
From retrospects
you’ll know later
were no accidents,
courage. What is
yet indecipherable, you
will mark and name.
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jeopardy in double danger
1. Tazmamart
8 July 1973, Rabat,
Morocco: Ali Bourequat and
two of his five brothers
Bayazid and Midhat, are
arrested and interrogated
blindfold in presence
of Hassid, King of
Morocco, who wants them
out of his damn way.
They get incarcerated
for eighteen years, the last
eleven in Tazmamart,
a disused tank barracks
beneath Atlas Mountains.
They get holed up in
adjacent underground
cells, three meters by two
pitch dark.
_____________________________________________________________
already in the abyss and falling into a pit
2. Where four winds meet
Never allowed out,
not seeing daylight for
eighteen years, each
has a concrete slab
for bed, eighty centimetres
long, two or three
blankets regardless
of heat or cold and one
change of shirt and
trousers per year. With
scorpions, cockroaches
and two visiting snakes
as cellmates, they
learn to sleep sitting.
If they lie down,
they’ll never get up
or out of this desert hole
where four winds meet.
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deep in the abyss danger, danger
3. With their whole hearts
Through ventilation-holes
they call each other, chant
Koranic verses, share
memories of paradisal
Paris streets, bars and cafés
where they’d met to drink
and restaurants where they’d
dined. They convert chick-pea
gruel to princely feasts
and, together, map contours
of countless remembered and
imagined places, name them
and take walks there, inhabiting
and repossessing them with their
whole hearts. ‘So long as we
had nothing at all,’ says Ali,
‘our memories clothed us, who
were spiritually naked.’
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abyss within abyss
4. Torturers
They supported one another.
Not knowing if they’d ever get
out, they did not give up.
When unseen companions
in neighbouring cells died, they
mourned them with prayers.
Deaths of others, together
with overhanging presences of
their own, redoubled their
strengths, for these were
inverse to those of emperors
and kings: the powers
of being powerless being
doubly more durable. Later
Ali says, ‘Human beings
possess resources they don’t
know about. Torturers can’t
destroy a person’s dignity.’
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handed through the vent a bowl of rice
5. An owl
Then an owl comes, bird
of ill-omen for Moslems. Each
nightfall seven times the
creature of night cries its
other cry, not the death cry.
5 September 1991: release,
no less mysterious and
incomprehensible than first
arrest and imprisonment.
Each weighs half his
previous body weight and
has to relearn to walk
and see. In this new light,
things keep flickering and
blurring then going out
of focus and dazzling
unbearably. Vision takes
three months to stabilise.
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pit full but an outside does exist
6. By a Scandinavian sea
Ali walks on the beach
by a Scandinavian sea
and picks up pebbles.
‘I no longer know what
fear is,’ he says. ‘And death
doesn’t frighten me. Or
violence. Or threats. I’ve
been plated in an armour
that isn’t known to exist
and can’t be taken off.
I’m sharper in awareness
of injustice from knowing
unbounded strength far
beyond hate. We were dead
and we came back. Now
delivered, I savour
unique moment’s breath
night and morning.’
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out of the pit
Copyright © Richard Berengarten 2015
Richard Berengarten is a European poet who writes in English and lives in Cambridge. Born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians, he has lived in Greece, Italy, the UK, the USA and former Yugoslavia, and has travelled widely in other countries. He has published more than 20 books and his poetry has been translated into more than 90 languages. His latest book, Notness: Sonnets, was published in March 2015 by Shearsman Books, which has also brought out new editions of several of his earlier titles, originally published under the name Richard Burns. The poem here, and another which appeared in Molly Bloom 7, are taken from Changing, a book-length poem composed between 1984 and 2014, whose structure is based on the I Ching.
