Stinging and cold,
and surrounded by imaginations
It is like the spring where my hand fell
As I washed it from his voice and from his breath

and like a truth that widens the more we dig
It becomes a forest, then a sea, then a star
this love,
I would’ve liked it to be a beacon light
And to see my beloved reflected on the sky

With his long shadow
His turned upward eyes
And his busy hands
He made me forget what little lovers know
What the old sailors’ songs say
And I forgot,
That you cannot convince a man you love
To wait until you regain your sunken hand
You cannot understand the distance between your lips and his neck
As long as the time between you passes like a whistle in the night
Just take him to the spring
And show him the rise of a kiss from the water

Absent and distant
trying to lay my head but the walls of the whole city
are wretched and dusty
and trying for a long time to call him: darling
And to gather enough tears to collapse of sadness
And the pain fades a little
And returns a little
Like a wavering boat
Beneath it lies a salty and a turbid life

I tell the world that I do not have a sea to sink in alone
I am not fit to drown in the seas of others
And that my voice is now rusty and gripping
My hands are cold on the bottom
But the road opens up like an old lie
I hid in the secret that I hid from myself
I say I did not know love
And the man whose beauty bites my heart
Gets erased by the day
But his words don’t

A woman dwindling like a candle
cannot face the night alone
loves a man who is withered  and arrogant
She loves his busy hands
His shadow and his neck
And like all those who suffer without noise
Throws her hand in the spring
And trembles of coldness and remorse

Marwa Melhem