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.