Contact Admin. Let me just say: Do you know what hurts the most? Yes, this is me at my weakest but can you deny that you were on the verge of tears when you finished? You put your head between your hands and cried like children do. I also remember what you said before you left: All this happened in less than an hour while the wind was howling outside like a pack of dogs and wolves far away echoed the howls.
Let me just say for this β and this alone β was poetry created: It is not enough for you to touch me with your hand love is touching me with everything, with woman and distance and a bunch of grapes. It is not enough that you take me under you and on top of you you have to drag me by feet and into nightmares as well. Love is not a relationship between two individuals like they told us but rather two universes melting, a mixture of water with water.
It is to love women as if I were you, to lust after their breasts to be riven seeing their naked flesh to gasp when a woman lifts her hair with her hand to put it behind her and just as your heart weakens when you see a hanging fruit my heart weakens for the same reason. Without air between us we are breathless without the sun rising above me and above you we are eyeless.
I incarnate in you like I incarnate in light and soil and you incarnate in me like life and death. I assembled you only because I collected you from here and there: Lamia Makaddem is a Tunisian poet and translator living in the Netherlands.
The author of two books of poetry, her verse has been translated into English, French, Dutch, and Kurdish. In she was awarded the El Hizjra prize for literature. She translated the award-winning Dutch novel Jij zegt het You said it , by Connie Palmen, and is currently working on the Arabic translation of Malva , by Hagar Peeters.
