JAWDAT FAKHREDDINE

in seconds or years. It will end. If only we could go into our encounter and never turn back. What is it that makes us never fade in our encounter that will end in a little while?

III

My poem, the one I drafted, I read. After I revised it, I read it again. Then I read it three, four times . . . then once I cast it aside, I recited it at a festival. And after all that, I forgot it. And now, every time I find it in a book from time to time, it beckons to me like a prisoner, lets out a sigh and glows. It questions me about my absence. Whenever I confront it, I face a new meaning for absence.

PREPARATION

A short while and we’ll be leaving. Here, there will remain what tells of us. Here, all that remains

42 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015

May, 1990