And I will not forgive you.
I will punish you with a punishment that you will never forget:
‘I will love you.’
There are people when you meet them you feel like you have met yourself.
Everything brings me back to you.
No, rather it keeps me in you.
Whenever I think about leaving,
I stumble upon your love.
I know we won’t meet.
I know the earth is not that round,
but I love you.
Love is a strange creature that doesn’t live long except when fed with a poisonous plant called separation.
And I knew from the beginning
That I found you to lose you
And loved you to miss you
Because we met by coincidence.
For had I not died several times of pain and loneliness,
I would not have perfected the art of living.
O stranger!
When I think about everything that was between us,
I get confused
Should I thank you?
Or should I forgive you?
I didn’t fall in love, I walked to it in steady steps with eyes wide open.
I am standing in love, not falling in love.
I want you with every bit of consciousness in me.
Every night I pretend I am going to sleep.
And when I lay on my bed, I open a window in my pillow and jump from it into the fields of the past.
Rebellious Owl
Why do I write?
Perhaps because my alphabet
Avenges itself against the oppressors
Who try to shine their shoes with my inkwell
And this blue wine that just spilled upon my paper
Seems to me the alphabet’s blood
So take it …drink it .…
For ink is sobriety’s wine.
An Owl Whose Heart is in Beirut
I still love you,
In spite of it all
For, at your shores I learned
How to drink moonlight from a seashell.
A Revived Owl
Every time you embrace me
I become a virgin again,
I feel it is my wedding night!
Translated from the Arabic by Noel Abdulahad
From “Dancing With the Owl.” Manshurat Ghada Samman, Beirut, 2003
Correspondances : Ghassan Kanafani to Ghada Al-Samman
But this time I will go on, knowing that I love you, and I will remain, bleeding out whenever the wind blows upon the dear things that we have built together.
Ghassan Kanafani to Ghada Al-Samman
Ghada, when I grabbed this sheet of paper to write, I knew that there was only one thing that I was capable of truly saying. I am sure of its veracity, depth and weight, which makes me believe that it is something destined, unalterable, something that will remain, as though it was fated from above:
I love you.
Ghassan Kanafani to Ghada Al-Samman