Dark Days

Deep and dark are the desert nights in mid-winter and a strange breeze rustles the sage. We plot an escape, even as the dark ones plot the end of the world. Look to the sky in wonder, for there are worlds out there...

Demon Brother

Time Moves, Enter the Sea

On Entering the Sea

Love happened at last, 

And we entered God's paradise, 

Sliding 

Under the skin of the water
Like fish.
We saw the precious pearls of the sea
And were amazed.
Love happened at last
Without intimidation...with symmetry of wish.
So I gave...and you gave
And we were fair.
It happened with marvelous ease
Like writing with jasmine water,
Like a spring flowing from the ground.

 ~Nazir

 WHEN I LOVE 

When I love 

I feel that I am the king of time 

I possess the earth and everything on it 

and ride into the sun upon my horse.

When I love
I become liquid light
invisible to the eye
and the poems in my notebooks
become fields of mimosa and poppy.

When I love
the water gushes from my fingers
grass grows on my tongue
when I love
I become time outside all time.

When I love
all the trees
run barefoot toward me…

Nizar Qabbani--

From the introduction to "Arabian love poems" by Bassam K. Frangieh, the translator: 

Qabbani saw in women a revolution and a means of liberation for both men and women. He linked women's rights with the war for social liberation in the Arab world, maintaining:"Unless we stop considering women as sex objects, there will be no liberartion. Sexual repression is the biggest problem in the Arab world." He called for an end to the game of love behind closed doors:"I have moved my bed to the open air and I have written my love poems on trees in public parks... to put an end to secretive and marshal laws imposed on the body of the Arab woman and make love legitimate." "People who are obsessed with sex", he wrote, "cannot write, think, or undertake any civilised achievement." Thus, he was convinced that sexual repression is one reason behind the economic backwardness of the Arab world, and that any revolution concerned solely with an individual's thoughts and not with his or her body is only half a revolution.