Dusting Off a Gilded Mirror

Ibrahim El-Baglaty (born in Mansoura, 1961) is an Egyptian physician, poet, novelist, and translator. He has published several poetry collections, including Training in Landscape (Merit, 2004), The Small Sea… A Romantic Farewell (Isis Press, 2004), Me in His Solitude (Badail, 2014), A Long Tale of a Sleeping Crocodile (Merit, 2017), And What Else Could Romantics Possibly Do? (GEBO, 2018), and Tea, Oranges, and Green Masks (2023).

In fiction, he has written the novels Syndrome (Al-Dar, 2009) and The Laboratory Dog (Al-Mahrousa Center, 2022).

He has also translated several works, most notably History of Medicine: From the Art of Healing to the Science of Diagnosis by Jean-Charles Sournia (Knowledge World Series, 2002), and Man Meets Dog by Konrad Lorenz (Al-Mahrousa Center, 2022).

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My father brought it home on the night of my naming,
or so he told me.
He spent the whole night awake,
lulling the baby
and guarding the pitcher—
as if he’d shaped us together on the same potter’s wheel.

And how he placed a thick candle in its short spout,
and a rosary around its long neck,
and how, when I fell from the sieve into his lap,
I somehow began to resemble him.

The pitcher stayed on the wardrobe
for twenty years,
fighting dust
and forgetting.

A week after he died—maybe less,
I don’t know what kind of heart I had
to take it down from its high tower.

I only wanted to wipe the dust off.

But it slipped from my hands—
like everything I love—

and broke.