Sawt al-Mara — page 20

We wanted it to be a "word" set down by the pen of Mrs. Nahida Fadli al-Dajani, recording her impressions of Damascus when she visited her friend Abla al-Houri during the Ramadan holiday — and behold, the "word" leaps and pulses with letters and meanings, bearing glad tidings of freshness and of invention in meaning and in presentation.. Is it not a shame that Mrs. Nahida should not have, in every issue of "The Woman's

Voice," a word like this one??..

In every glance I was enraptured Our sky — letters of longing And our earth — hiding places and countryside In every voice I lived As though I were the letter..

alone, I am nothing And with the sons of my country I am love and light and goodness I wished I could work with the sons of my country...

The men of the frontier in their

With the Defeat of Night!

O night, you alone suffice to water my passions

or to bury them all in a far-off wasteland

O night! You alone are a lifetime, in whose unknown reaches

there is time to bury my clamor and my din

O night, in my eye's socket now there is a power

to draw my lights out of the darkness

Flow, tears, that I may shake my heart free of its troubles

and wipe away the illusion of my fortune and my misfortune

Let me be, and stretch out a wing forever dark;

let me be, for here is my fuel within my depths

My tears are my fuel — and should they sink away from my sight,

there is in my veins enough for my offering

O night, gently — I have given up all my desire

save for your heart; leave it, then, to slake my thirst

Gently with me; do not hasten and leave me

while in me there is a longing for night, or for darkness

O night, gently — no wish remains to me

but you, in the expanse of orbits and skies

So, O stars, leave the night and withdraw —

a solitary night — though my contentment be dearly won

O morning star, oh leave it and go into exile,

or turn back, in mercy, to the far-off rising-place!

By Mrs. Nahida Fadli al-Dajani

Nahida Fadli al-Dajani

official uniforms see that we cross our own land in peace.. we pass from Lebanon into Syria to meet those we love.. And I was alone.. and I was with them.. and I was not! I overstepped time and frontiers.. and I was not!

And I spent in Damascus hours that were, by the reckoning of the calendar, two days. With poetry I lived, wrapped in its silken threads; and up to the Rabwa that overlooks the city I climbed with Adonis in a carriage drawn by horses, driven by an old man who has kept company with horses and roads all his life

And I wished I could drown in his eyes, to live the beauty stored up in them! With the story I lived — the life of a woman setting out from across the far-off years, laden with envy and with meaning, flinging herself upon scattered pages — I swear they are the dearest thing Abla owns today.. She read me chapters of it, and at every instant she would look up at me, into my eyes, probing the wakefulness of my mind and my senses and my heart; and she threw the pages down between herself and me.. — "Well?" — You haven't wished me good morning.. and it is your habit to fill your