The Unfulfilled Love Writes to the Wind

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

Haifa’s eyes are drowsy and lavish in their charm, plunging into depth and lost in horizons. Their magic steals you even from a great distance. Their depths draw you like a magnet; they pull you, heavy, into an abyss from which you cannot leave or be freed.

At their rim there are breezes and the sky’s apparitions, and in their depths lie the jewels of our Lord’s secrets, who fashioned us from a clot. O dreamer’s disappointment despite seventy houris, yet in Haifa’s eyes is an ocean of maidens’ glances and a sky of radiance. Woe to our fates and to our dashed hopes.

Her spell called me from afar to come near, and her light in the shadowed night summoned me. I approached and found myself dancing the dance of death in a jubilant glow. I came to her like a butterfly on fragile wings; I came to burn in the light that had drawn me from afar. I became a martyr, nothing more than a number in the tally.

Her love overwhelms you, and defiance pushes you into the chasms of ruin. If you test your hardness, you will fall into frailty. Your arrow will miss; your iron, however tempered, and your resolve, however strong, will be undone by an arrow from a single eyelash. Do not boast, lest you end up bound in iron manacles. Do not resist, lest you be folded like a leash rope or broken like a tiny match.

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On a wall bulletin I inscribed not with ink or pen but with my soul. I wrote with the bleeding blood of my heart for her, and I set the letters of love aflame with sleepless nights and fires. On the sea of her deep eyes I wrote what pearls I could and what swells of longing I could summon. I wrote the despair of a seaman more storm-tossed than the sea he attempts to cross. O my despair: I have neither craft nor means to cross it, no boat, no plank of wood.

I saw her reading what I had written; astonishment seized me, and with that wonder I cried aloud, “My God!” Let the minarets lift their voices, let church bells ring, let the heavens rejoice with us, for Haifa reads what I wrote. I shouted a resonant joy: “I have found her!” O paradise of noble love. But soon she turned away from what I had written, and I, who had never guessed, was disappointed.

I wrote for the one I love my flashes and my fires; she passed them by, cold as winter, wandering, distracted and indifferent. She neither sees nor feels nor senses; she cares nothing for my jewels and my gleams. Perhaps I am the fool, the one who failed to cross and to arrive, to deliver my messages despite all the fever and intensity with which I live. I must confess: I am a failure at love with highest honors.

I had titled what I wrote “A Supplication to the Eyes,” and I thought she would read my words twice. But she betrayed my trust. I left her with tears raging with fury; I cursed her in the part of me that had lost its balance, I cursed myself, and I cursed my shame twice.

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