Love Sonnet XVII

One day I will find you and you will have this written on a crumpled but carefully folded piece of paper that will be in your back pocket. And when we greet each other your hand will reach for the paper and, as carefully and gently as it was folded, you will unfold it and recite the following:

Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

If this were the only thing you could say and give to me, then I would be happy. We could depart with love, still in love. I would live loving you secretly - in the space between two thoughts, heartbeats and words.

Mohja Kahf

from E-Mails From Scheherazad by Mohja Kahf

Disbeliever

On January 11, 1998, unidentified gunmen entered a movie theater and a small mosque in Sidi Ahmed near Algiers and massacred 120 men, women, and children at close range during Algeria's ongoing civil conflict.

By the limping of the people of Iraq
By the sound of frantic running in Qana, in Kosovo
By the men and boys of Hama massacred
By the swollen bodies in a river in Rwanda
and Afghani women and the writers of Algiers,
I am a disbeliever

in everything that refuses to kiss
full on the lips the ones still living
and receive them in the bosom of the self,
no matter the religion or the nation or the race
I am a disbeliever in everything
that does not say "How was the movie? I love you"

I need a body outside my life that can travel and kneel
on the sidewalk beside a movie theater in Algiers
over the bodies of the supple children
who will never be my children's playmates or marry them
over the bodies of the men and women
who will never write me a letter,
will never phone me from Algiers,
"How was the movie? I love you, I love you."

I need time outside this history
where I can whisper in the ear of each of them,
By God, you will never be forgotten
By God, I will make sure the world
buries its face in your beautiful hair,
sings to you, learns your name and your music,
lifts you up in the crook of its arm like a gift

I am a disbeliever
in everything but the purity of the bodies
of the men and women - with or without the veil,
with or without the markings of the right identity -
in everything but the suppleness of the children
I am a disbeliever in every scripture
in the world that leaves out
"How was the movie? I love you, I love you."