Whispers of My Heart to Haifa

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

Haifa, I have always wished to be a tear of sorrow in the corner of your eye, a faint shadow of grief on your dreaming face. Sadness, too, makes your eyes shine and bewitch; it lends your features a deeper beauty and irresistible charm. Those who adore you ache with longing, and their devotion only adds to your radiance in their eyes. How wonderful it would be to share your sorrow and find blessing in it. Who among us is without sorrow?

I wished to be a lock of hair in the parting of your tresses, to fly beyond orbit, to travel to distant reaches, to ascend with you to the sky. Together we would explore the unknowns written for us, what the Merciful has inscribed with pen and tablet, and answer every question.

I still remember when you parted your braids into two, one to the right and one to the left, and I stood between the strands and plaits, nailed by the question: why not let your hair loose to the wind, the sea, and the breezes? I search for you in every space, after every lesson and every class, like letters that have wandered from their words and words searching for their missing dots. Without you, letters are neither salt nor honey; they have no taste. There is no poetry in poetry, no ardor, no verse in love.

When I see you flow, my springs become waterfalls, rivers, and streams seeking your soil, your homeland, your sorrows. Without struggle you captivate all five of my senses from A to Z. Because of you I season things; by your flavor the heavens open their lungs to breathe your scent. Your radiant presence returns sunrise, light, and joy to my dusk and decline. Your taste is delicious, and it awakens the appetite of the dreaming world within me.

At your whispers my imagination opens the doors of my senses and the ears of my love wide. Enter, a thousand welcomes, like a Night of Destiny or a beautiful dream I pray will never depart. Through you I see letters as pearls and jewels within a poem. Without you, life is departure and death. Without you I feel an emptiness encircling me, erupting within as despair and disappointment.

I am the wandering letters across distant expanses, searching for my fleeing dots. How can I write the poem when failure engulfs me? My half still seeks its missing other half in remote tomorrows. How can broken letters recover their health? How can stray letters compose a poem in the lush grove of noble verse?

I wrote of your eyes, Haifa, with deep wounds in my weary soul and a gaping maw that swallows me twice each day. I tried to reclaim my half and recover some of you in my verses, but your eyes had wandered far from me. If my arrows aimed at you returned in vain, they struck the heart that broke for a love that does not love me. Who engineers the chemistry between human souls? Why, O pen, do you steal my other half and not write for us, in that primordial time, the perfect love engraved on heaven’s tablet?

I tried to sharpen my arrows in the hell that scorches me, to harden them with my agonies and conceal what I had hidden. I wanted to strike the beloved with my lightning, and I wish I had not, for every bolt returned to explode me with a thousand failures and shocks. I am the lover who has burdened love with its weight and drenched it in a thousand calamities and wounds.

You used to sleep beneath my eyelids every evening and wake there; you would pass by my side as lightly as a refreshing sea breeze or the radiance of a beautiful morning, poised like a perfect verse and capturing the heart as if by miracle. You moved with the gait of a dove, and within me love would sing. When you greeted me, your greeting was a bridge that watered my thirsty soul and filled it with breath. When you drifted away, I felt only horror and catastrophe.

I longed to travel into all you wrote and never return, for you had become my refuge, my solace, a homeland that rescued me from the exile I had lived through, where I had lost my face and the letters of my name. I wished to be your pen, your notebook, your eraser, your pardon, a painting hung on your bedroom wall that you would wander through in detail before every sleep and nap, a pillow you would rest beneath your gentle cheek when you sank into deep sleep and soared with happy dreams.

How I wished to be the bottle of your perfume that adores you and longs for you at every moment. My heart that pumps my blood, I would give to you wrapped in light, searching for you through roads and places. A balcony filled with your fragrant roses; your shawl, your handkerchiefs, and every detail in your wardrobe; your daily passage to the mirror, the wall clock, even your bracelets, lipstick, and nail polish — all of it is my mad love for you, Haifa. Do not be surprised or bewildered.

But the ending came without flower, without musk, without light. The separation lengthened its ropes across years and the long sweep of time. I spent my soul on the toil of travel and the traveling time; when despair overtook pursuit, waiting long with meetings absent, no arrival, no hope, and distances between us widening, the final path was not ours. The question remained: how can I reach you? Distances stretched into the horizon, and my journeys ended in failure, crawling in the abyssal depths.

I gathered my shattered, glasslike spirit and desperately searched for your scattered traces, but however loud my voice, it could not reach the edges of your hearing; its echo faded into the vast distances. Around you remained a throng of admirers and onlookers with their clamor, while my persistent fate blocked every path to you. And I, of whom they said on the day of my birth that I was fortunate and blessed with a happy destiny, was left standing, thwarted.

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