Mohamed Metwalli was born in Cairo in 1970. He was awarded a B.A. in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal prize by Riyad el-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad in which his second volume of poems appeared, The Story the People Tell in the Harbor, 1998. He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writers’ Program, at the University of Iowa in 1997. Later he was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of Off-beat Egyptian Poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas press in 2002. He published his third collection The Lost Promenades in 2010 by the independent al-Ketaba al-Okhra publications. He participated as a guest poet in the Semana Poetica Poetry Festival at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in Fall 2011. Lost Promenades was republished by the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO) in 2013. A Song by the Aegean Sea, his latest collection of poetry, was published by Afaq Publishers, Cairo in 2015.
On the sand beach of Alexandria
There was a foot print
of the most attractive woman
who viewed the waves
About two thousand years or the like,
On the opposite sea coast to my country
Aristotle was plucking out the heart of a turtle
in order to reveal its soul
And he could not find reproductive organs in the eel
so he thought it reproduces by itself!
*****
The waves erased the traces of the most attractive woman
who viewed them,
and in the mud
there hid the eel,
and on the page of the waters
there was a floating poem
near the fishing boats!
Mohamed Metwalli
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Poetry in this post: © Mohamed Metwalli
Published with the permission of Mohamed Metwalli