Wandering Thought # 120

When was the last time you felt your body as Eros incarnate, as though the fires of creation itself were leaping out of it and could not be contained? When did you last feel your existence entire as a divine fragment, filled with longing for something infinite, overflowing with an incomprehensible madness and an exquisite harmony? When was it you last felt all the stars in the universe pulsing in your single beat of heart, pulsing and pulsing with an irremediable fire that wants to create over and over the entire universe in the image of your love? A thousand lightning churning together through your body, yet deeply imbued with the stillness of dawn?—Ah listen, just wait and listen, the whole of life is within you, it was for you that the universe was created, it was to embrace you that love was born. It is time to open you heart and feel, and let go of the constraints of your mind. Feel, even if it tears you apart; feel this boundless joy that has been your fate since the beginning of time.

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Wandering Thought # 119

For most people a good life is one that is eaten up by work, and which fruits are the pleasures and sense of power and prestige that that work provides. This is the modern ideal and promise, a life of work and spiritual vacuum.

Haiku # 707

Rain…
the impassioned kiss
of earth and sky

~

Poetry…
stripped of everything
except this longing

~

Alone in this world…
my path deepening
into autumn mist

Love Desired

The passing years
knitted our lives
closer and closer
until we became
woven together
into a single fabric,
our beings emitting
a deeply harmonious music
as they merged over and over
with ever increasing intensity,
enlarging our love,
this world between us,
this infinitely warm nest,
to fill the whole sky,
mirroring each other
ever so truthfully,
ever so nakedly,
in the still water of our silence,
our shared and beating heart.

Poem for my Future Life

All I’ve got left
is this growing body,
in its dark depths
preparing the seeds
of a future life
I will not live,
fermenting the ink
for a new poem
that will be written
long after I’m dead.

Haiku # 706

هذا الشعر
أكتبهُ كأنني أُحيكْ
ثياباً لأُلبِسَكِ

~

هذه الحياة
ومضةُ نجمٍ
في بحرِ النسيان

~

بينَ البداية والنهاية
لهذهِ القصيدة جَسَدْ
أُريدُهُ قبلة

~

هذا الجسد
سأترُكَهُ يوماً
لأذهب مع الريح

Free Verse # 457 (touch is sacred)

She sent me poems
of unrequited love,
I smiled at the irony –
I loved her
and she didn’t love me back.

~

تبلغ العلاقة حميميتها العميقة عندما يتراقص الجسدان على إيقاع الشعر، عندما يصبح الشعر المدى والعمق الذي يغلفهما، الذي فيه يتحركان، يتناغمان ويمتزجان.

~

وجهها، فيه ما يكفي لشاعر ان يكتب كل ايام حياته، دون أن ينتهي.

وجهك كتاب صلاة كلما غصت به وجدت نفسي أحترق كالبخور في حضرة الله.

~

Je t’aime, il lui ai dit,
chaque jour au lever du matin,
chaque jour au coucher du soleil.

أحبكِ، قالها لها،
كل يوم عند طلوع الضوء،
كل يوم عند مغيب الشمس.

~

What time does to a heart no one can tell.

~

Every year a new discovery, and a little less knowledge of the human heart.

~

To consume and be consumed;
to die of fire and become light.

~

Only he who speaks the language of your soul can understand your eyes.

~

Two bodies united
by a single rhythm
of the beating heart

~

Beauty fades, but love remains.

~

Touch is sacred
so I write poetry

~

Her name is full
of sky and wind;
to utter it is to fill
with endless distances.

~

You live in me as a secret I confess only in poetry.

~

What her veil of beauty hides he goes on after,
Shroud after shroud seeking the mystical center.

~

In the eye of time mountains are no more than splashing waves.

Haiku # 705

A little quiet
and I find it again…
this beat in my heart

~

This world
dew on a flower shaking
in autumn’s fading light

~

Moon over water
without a ripple
you slide into my thoughts

~

This body
one day I will leave it
and go with the wind

Tanka # 213

After I’m gone
think of me
as nothing more
than a whisper
traveling the wind

~

This morning
I kissed life again
and it filled my heart
with a longing
for something unnamable

~

From each wood hike
I gather bird songs
and frail scents
of fallen leaves and wildflowers
that I knit into poems

Wandering Thought # 118

What does modernity say? You are nothing if you are not seen; you are a commodity, wholly made for sight; your value lies outside yourself, in being seen; the image is your god.

Haiku # 704

عيد ميلادي الأربعين
أكثرُ اصفراراً هذه السنة
أوراقُ الخريف

My fortieth birthday
even more yellow this year
the autumn leaves

My fortieth birthday
only solitude keeps
the promise of the years

عن الشعر والحب

أقرأ قصائدي القديمة
لأجد فتات النساء
اللواتي أحببتهنّ يوماً
.واللواتي اختفين في الحقول
قصائدي كلها قصيدة واحدة
مرسومة كالوشم
،على بشرة المرأة الوحيدة
.والتي تختصر في كيانها كل النساء
قصيدتي انشودة مطر
،في حقل جسدها
قمر عالق
.في شعرها الأسود