deting

“When I fell in love,
The kingdom of the Lord changed.
Twilight slept in my coat,
And the sun rose from the west.”
― Nizar Kabbani

“This is my last letter
There will be no others.
This is the last grey cloud
That will rain on you,
After this, you will never again
Know the rain.
This is the last drop of wine in my cup
There will be no more drunkenness.

This is the last letter of madness,
The last letter of childhood.
After me you will no longer know
The purity of youth
The beauty of madness.
I have loved you
Like a child running from school
Hiding birds and poems
In his pockets.
With you I was a child of
Hallucinations,
Distractions,
Contradictions,
I was a child of poetry and nervous writing.
As for you,
You were a woman of Eastern ways
Waiting for her fate to appear
In the lines of the coffee cups.

How miserable you are, my lady,
After today
You won't be in the blue notebooks,
In the pages of the letters,
In the cry of the candles,
In the mailman's bag.
You won't be
Inside the children's sweets
In the colored kites.
You won't be in the pain of the letters
In the pain of the poems.
You have exiled yourself
From the gardens of my childhood
You are no longer poetry.”
― Nizar Qabbani, Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts

“All words
In the dictionaries, letters, and novels
Died.
I want to discover
A way to love you
Without words.”
― Nizar Qabbani, Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts

“The two years
You were my lover
Are the two most important pages
In the book of modern love.
All the pages before and after
Were blank.
These pages
Are the lines of the equator
Passing between your lips and mine
They are the measures of time
That are used
To set the clocks of the world.”
― Nizar Qabbani, Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts