Tag Archives: Dubai

Bassara by Rewa Z.

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Rewa Z is one of the favorite writers and indeed, women, I have had the pleasure of meeting and hearing the past couple of years. An unwavering poetician, a rock solid lady, and a strong voice. Enjoy. Her bio is under the page, Poets.

Bassara:

“she who sees”

Comes from the arms of faraway sands

her hands stains of carob trees

she dances her bare feet like jewels, liberated

by the bands of khelkhal around her ankles.

She follows to where I don’t tell her I am going

and the blue crashes against the rocks underneath

the concrete underneath our feet. She wants to read my palms,

hers engraved with maps of henna and I

at home at last, to last.

She draws me in as she massages sadaf

against her fingers as if the lines in my skin

aren’t telling enough. And her hair is henna and her eyes henna

and her skin is henna-hued as she converts the sun into amber

eyelids and the bronze of her palms and the shape

of her mouth as she reads my hand,

only to tell me I have so much leaving.

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On a Bus, traveling.

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Working a lot this week, in production, moving constantly and dealing with events and deadlines and battling sunsets and light. Not much time to update our poets section and start introducing you to the fantastic group of writers who have joined Poetician events. I promise to get to that next week.

For now, I leave you with an exhausted poem I wrote on the way home from filming in the desert yesterday.

It is inspired by a colleague and is very simple.

Marriage

Written on a bus

UAE, 26/1/2010

A man I worked with

for twelve hours in heat rising

in the deserts and big cars of our gulf

separate

takes out his homework on the endless road home

to beds and ginger tea and sanctified sleep

and studies, quiet.

Why are you learning Spanish we ask,

watching him pour his last few drops of power into curling lines

new words

new meanings

new language life rhythm music and spirit

my wife is from Argentina he says

simply, answer enough

I am silent, envision a faceless woman he

will hope to hold forever.

I had a lover once who learnt Arabic for me.

He asked for coffee and spelled it kahwa

never wanted sukkar

he learnt to put the correct h in habibti

he learnt to say help me, ana mareed

he chose to call my eyes small almonds

to make love

dirty words in Arabic breathless new found intimacy and patience

I call him lover because he loved me

repeating words from countries alien to embrace closer the woman he pronounced

out of millions of bright eyed strangers in New York city

he took on a language a life music rhythm and spirit

and today

a gulf

deserts

we travel

and I cannot get you to even take on our possibility.