Salma... This Enduring Song

How can there be words for Salma?

What would be right, by way of fidelity, is that she be sung — and that she be sculpted!

At what turning toward goodness or beauty did Salma not give? And it seems to me that the earth that was heaped over her, at the last, is rich with fragrance and loveliness.

She holds a claim — and what a hand was Salma's! — upon literature. She brought into it freshness and the fluttering of butterflies. Before her it was the man, with his rasping voice, who sounded in the scratching of the woman's pen. She perched the canary amid gentle ease, and made time pass over our pines slowly, with the unhurried grace of brides.

She holds a claim upon Lebanese nature. Before her it was like some scene out of the old desert poets — dunes, and a stage for oryx and gazelles — and she settled in it our flower and our young girls. The girls of simplicity, and the child, and the mother. Until it seemed that man began once more to look about him in our literature, to brighten and to laugh.

She holds a claim upon the work of cultivation. She carried to completion — and in what style! — a noble tradition, one that goes back to Byblos, by which the greater part of the great, before they take up the leadership of a nation, first come to know the leading of a child; and in this silent field, so modest in its displays of earnestness, two generations were reared upon the charms of her pen.

She holds a claim upon authorship. For while the men of letters among us live on the poem or the article recited at a gathering or published in a newspaper, she engaged with her readers through the long, wearying nights of self-cultivation: going down into the arena of supply and demand with a book that shakes consciences or risks rejection.

She holds a claim upon the honoring of worth and the acknowledgment of kindness. In an age when envy spread and fidelity died, she kept to the ways of the forebears. Let a rising light gleam, and she would seek it out and proclaim it a light. She would lift a gesture of generosity clear of its stumble, and write a volume about it.

She holds a claim upon heroism. There was no courageous step among the stages of Lebanon's aspiring toward the sun in which she did not shoulder her share of the leadership. And the homeland's last memory of her was the day she chose to open a battle of struggle strange to the East: she stripped from her breast a decoration that was the most honorable thing she wore, and returned it to a falsified regime as unworthy of coming to her from that regime's hand. Her gesture remained alone. And there she was, once again, in our backward society, commander and army in one.

And today, now that Salma's face is gone — our Salma, ours, the poets' — I feel that the fragrance on the hillside has grown scarce, and the breezes on the hills have turned to scorching winds. And on the evening they laid her away, near our shore, on the loveliest strand on earth, I witnessed more than one young bride name her daughter “Salma,” for the blessing of that brave and noble pen, and more than one son of a poet whose father had sung of a Salma, the freshest face of his age — tears and sorrow flooding her eyelids — because she who once starred our sky had ceased to be!