Ashraf O.

“The best days of summer are the days of summer gone.”
― Joe Bolton, The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990

“If strength is love, then we weren't strong enough,
But if strength is letting love go, we were.”
― Joe Bolton, The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990

“For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“And we who loved the world must learn the language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms, the irrevocable distance between the goodbye and the letting go.”
― Joe Bolton, The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990