Lisa Suhair Majaj
Always knew it would come back
to haunt me. It was war, time was short,
the truck was leaving, and with it my hope
of safe passage from that besieged city.
She was in another place, phone lines
down, no time to search her out.
I had to flee. And so I did. I knew
the spool of time would never
rewind, that there would be no
going back; that with that leaving,
I would lose my chance to find her
before the bombs exploded–
her home destroyed, her brother burned,
her eyes torn to darkness.
Where is she now? Would she
remember me if I found her?
And if I kissed her cheeks three times,
Lebanese style, and called her habibti,
hayati, would she speak to me,
smile? Or would she turn away,
her life so changed, her griefs so far from mine
that there would be no point in saying, even, goodbye?
Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of Geographies of Light, winner of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in over fifty journals and anthologies worldwide. She is also co-editor of three collections of critical essays: Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers; Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist. She lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.
