Remembrance
"... Here, take this, O you forbidden to me —
that some song in your name may reach you"
However many secrets I hide within myself
and flee from remembrance,
lest her nights come across my mind
and I fall to thinking of her —
and however much I wring my mind and heart,
it finds no cure, and I do not repent.
Enough! One girl I cast off, and another I cast off,
and I forget them... and there she is,
still keeping her tryst with me in dream.
Oh, how often I have embraced the illusion —
and oh, the sweetness of her innocence —
Hawi! and though I left her — alas!
And in the emptiness of my heart, in the loneliness of its nights,
I call upon your remembrance:
if only there were some blaze to set the breast aglow —
a blaze! and there it is, a whole lifetime.
Your love quivers within it, and there wake
the wounds of a deep secret:
***
You were mine, and you would dream of me —
oh, your tenderness toward me!
You were mine — with no arm wound about a waist,
no trembling of breast on breast;
I took my fill from your love of tenderness and fire
in two short nights:
as much as the life we lived together, I remember,
and as much as it gave me — all of it, and more.
Khalil Hawi
If Only I Were
As'ad al-Sab'ali
If only I were a sparrow in my own country!
The breeze of Lebanon would carry my songs,
swaying the streams, setting the valley dancing,
and on the boughs I would trill my fill,
and my hunter would shoot me down for food!
***
And I would be glad
if a hungry man brought me down —
but on one condition: that he be
a hunter from Lebanon.
***
My soul be ransom for the land of my forefathers,
and my soul a ransom for my country — and for my country...
If only I were
If only I were some green ear of wheat —
and no sooner had I put on my yellow dress
than there she'd come, gleaning behind the reaper
among the stubble, that dark shepherdess.
***
May she have the wit
to come near and pick me up,
and on palms scored by the sickle's cuts
shell out my grains with love.
***
And if the watchman saw her,
I do not think he would wrong her —
her neck: the sun,
this season, has flayed it!!
***
And July has painted her cheek ember-red,
and the beads of her sweat run down red.
***
Barefoot upon the thorns,
perishing of hunger —
O master of the threshing floor,
be a Lebanese!
***
Where is your kindness, where?!
She is your sister — how can you have the heart?
Give her some of the sheaves —
if only... an armful or two.
***
Do not say "tomorrow"! Who can count on tomorrow?
Life is a doze, and the
A Peddler, Then a Millionaire
The millionaire Baron Empain, builder of Heliopolis, has died — at the very moment when he was waiting on burning coals for the outcome of the efforts being made to permit his return to Egypt.
The Baron tasted the most grind-ing poverty in his father's lifetime, when his father allowed him a monthly stipend of ten pounds — so that at one time he was forced to work as a street peddler, selling soap in Paris!
When his father died, the Baron became one of the ten richest men in the world, and made his name in the night clubs and the salons!
The Baron loved women and food... but his stomach was not strong enough to digest, and so it delighted him to watch people eating ravenously; he would stand observing them in longing and regret!
It happened that his health declined, and the doctors advised him to cut down his evening parties. He said:
— Impossible. I want to live every moment of my life.
37