Endurance
“To an ungrateful woman...”
You have toyed with the husks and let the truths go by,
and never grasped the ends of things.
Gently — what wealth is there in heaping up money,
in raising houses and palaces?
The builder of the Pyramids built them to last:
he died, and the digger of graves came off the winner.
Gently — the nights will let no building stand
that is not built of thought and light.
Thrones shall come crashing down upon their masters,
and every glory of vanity shall pass away.
Tomorrow, Layla, every house shall crumble
save one delicate house made of feeling.
Come, then, and dwell in an exquisite meaning
that lives on despite the ravages of the ages.
Wadih Deeb
Dreams
Continued from page 7
humiliation of the soul and the affront to one's person! — You are right. I must think of a suitable solution. I shall leave teaching. I shall take up nursing, or office work. I must find other work...
And Su'ad said: I too shall refuse this man, and devote myself to the study of painting. How can they expect me to kill my feelings? How can I live in an atmosphere of perpetual lying and hypocrisy?.. It shall not be!
We parted, agreeing to meet in two weeks' time. But the two weeks passed and we did not meet. News reached us of Su'ad's marriage to the man she loathed, and in the card she sent us there was a phrase that bespoke surrender and indifference. We met her after her marriage, and behold, she was contented and cheerful, as if money had lent her a look of appetite and languor, and doubled her weight.
I once met Nuha in one of the shops, and I glimpsed in her eyes a rigidity I had never known in her before. The old gaiety had left her, and she had decided to stay in her post because, as she said, she feared change and plunging into new problems. She dreads not finding anything better, and she cannot bear idleness and retreat into the narrow world of the home, which she can no longer endure.
I used to invite her to take trips with me, and she would beg off; and I saw that she had surrendered, little by little, to a mechanical, sluggish life. As for me, I have gone on dreaming of a long journey after the model of “Su's” journey; and I do not know — shall I too bury my dreams as Nuha and Su'ad buried theirs? For no reason except that we lacked that boldness we had known in the girl we admired. And because our culture lay in words and imagination, not in action... Or perhaps there are other reasons...
Love
Munir Hanna
You squandered, with your guilty recklessness, our heart's desire,
and left behind, of our love, its tormented remnant:
an anthem whose echo rang loud in my heart,
one that in days past we both would sing.
It lived on as a rapture in which we swaggered
over the world, and reveled in our own world,
raising up from the ribs of love a house
from whose two balconies we looked out proudly over all others.
Visions in which, yesterday, life was sweet —
oh, for that yesterday that embraced our steps!
We roamed the vineyard, plucking from the vines;
we wandered the field, drinking deep of our meeting;
we hurried with the breeze up to the hilltops,
pouring out our longing as our desires pleased,
inventing pretexts and riddles
that we might be happy, secure, in our trysting place.
O dark one, O very color of caprice,
enough of the caprice that has struck us!
I want a love with no torment in it,
no temptation kindling what we crave —
a union of passions, a renunciation
of all release, an overflow of our contentment;
and in your eyes I would meet what is in my own,
caress it, and we would drown in our visions;
and the sweet things of life, when they appear,
our two eyes would behold them in our two selves.
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