Nizar Kabbani

I found this poet in researching different Arabic literature. He has a lot of beautiful literature, but I love these two.

Women, The Knowledge of God

Tenderness fades in your eyes
Like circles of water,
Time, space, fields,
Houses, seas, ships
Disappear.
My face falls to the ground like a broken vase
That I carry in my hands,
Dreaming of a woman who will buy it,
But I am told
That women do not buy sad faces.

We reached the point
Where we did not know what to say
All subjects became the same
The foreground merged with the background.
We reached the peak of despair
Where the sky was a bullet,
Embracing was retaliation,
Making love was the severest punishment.

It is up to you to love me.
I do not know how to read your lips
To predict when
Water will explode beneath the sands,
I do not know
During which month
You will be more abundant
And fertile
Or on which day
You will be ready for
The communion of love.

I Will Tell You: I Love You

I will tell you: I love you
When all old love languages die
And nothing remains for lovers to say or do
Then my task
To move the stones of this world
Will begin.

I will tell you: I love you
When I feel
That my words are worthy of you
And the distance between your eyes
And my notebooks disappears,
I will say it when I am able
To evoke my childhood,
My horses, my troops
And my cardboard boats
And able to regain
The blue time with you
Upon Beirut’s shores
When you were tired,
Shivering like a fish between my fingers,
And I covered you
With a sheet made of summer stars.

I will tell you: I love you
When I am cured of my schizophrenia
And become a single person.
I will say it
When the city and the desert inside me
Are reconciled.
When all the tribes leave my blood,
When I will be free of the blue tattoo
Engraved on my body,
Free of old Arab remedies
Which I tried for thirty years
And which told me
To lash you eighty times
For being a woman.
Perhaps I will not say:
I love you.
It takes nine months
For a flower to bloom,
The night suffers a great deal
In giving birth to a star,
Humanity waits one thousand years
To produce a prophet,
Why don’t you wait then
To be my lover.