In My Library — Alone with the Days by Fadwa Tuqan

The University Graduates' Publication Committee, 1952

... Alone with the days ... thus do poets live ... alone ... always alone ...

But, in their solitude, their depths ring with a thousand worlds and more; processions of visions and fancies contend within their souls; and while they live in their desolate, gloomy world, they see worlds thriving with love, full of peace, brimming over with a thousand shades and more of rapture and of spirit!...

So if our poetess walks through the fields and meadows, it is “so that the hidden wings that lift her spirit above the world of men may enfold her, and so that she may melt into people, her spirit passing away into the spirit of existence.”

Ah, would that I might pass away, as I long to, into all existence!

How deep you are, O spirit — spirit of the poets — how wide your expanse and how pure!

The storming wind, the rebellious expanse, the black and dusky clouds — all, all of them find a welcome echo in the soul of our poetess. All... all of them cast shadows in her heart... all are reflected in her soul as phantoms and fancies:

And in my soul, like it, crouch cloud and fog
and shadows I have mirrored in the specters of evening!

*

All of them figure in my soul a symbol of my ending!
The symbol of a life drifting down, setting, toward extinction!

... With the spirit alone the poetess swims through spaces of silence... by feeling alone she lives, gazing toward the unknowns of the universe and of nature, and she wishes:

... and in her a sweeping longing —
could she but take the universe to her breast,

embrace it, and let the spirit drink its fill
of its great signs and of their magic —

hug the earth ... clasp the sky,
kiss the clouds upon their way

But she collides — and how dreadful the collision — with the butterfly, the bright butterfly of the meadow, which:

dies in silence, as though the stages of the garden
had never overflowed with her wedding feasts

So she grieves over her and bends tenderly and wraps her in her love and tenderness — is she not a sister to her?

Little sister, do not grieve, for here am I,
weeping for you in tender, gentle verse.

I shall be folded away, like you, forgotten —
no companion to remember me, no friend.

Ah, how cruel is death, that brings us at last
to the deep cavern of extinction!

*

The poetess withdrew into solitude because she loathed the world of men... and what is there in their world but deceit, hypocrisy, and favoritism? She lived in her own airs and her dreams above the expanses of space, wanting to loose her soul from its captivity, wanting to shatter her fetters, to pass beyond bounds and barriers and soar free beyond time and place!! On earth she is appalled by the torrent of blood, by man's violence against his brother man, by the struggle of human beings and their scrambling greed for ... nothing!

Yes, it is these great tragedies
that torture the delicate feeling in you,

so you draw far away from a frightful reality
to a deep world of genius ...

And the poetess's solitude leads her to fall in love with ... the night ... She spreads upon it the sail of her heart, crosses its dark, deep flood, and rows through it “in a boat with no companion aboard” — until, feeling that her heart, this small great heart, is like the night in its secrets and its riddles, in its breadth and its extent; that it has held all manner of emotions, and all manner of passions have played within it, believing at one moment and doubting at another, dark at times as coal and radiant at others as light — she cried out, bewildered, asking:

O heart, O one of the two small things,
how did you grow wide enough for this existence?

And how do you bear this thronging crowd
of stirrings past all counting!

You love and you hate, free and unbound —
no barriers and no fetters;

you repel the call of the love that is near
and you crave the call of the enemy far away!

Your mind is blind; it leads my reins
as the deed of stubborn passion wills

*

And how splendid solitude is when, in the eyes of the poetess, it means freedom and release:

Leave me, leave me in the world of my seclusion
to savor my solitude and my retreat!

To savor the release of my soul, and the freedom
of my spirit from its murderous captivity!

You loved your solitude, O poetess — the solitude wide enough for the whole world, in which hearts have beaten and souls have burned with anguish!!

Blessed be your solitude — a sweet spring for our thirsting souls, an overflowing fountain of this generous poetry and this bountiful giving!