The Syrian poet, Adonis, or Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, who might have won the Nobel Prize this year, wrote this below. I imagine the Nobel Committee thought it would be too political to choose a Syrian writer in this political climate of The Arab Spring. It’s from the title poem of the book, Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter:

                                I summon angels and ambulances—
I turn into water and flow in the pool of my sorrows
or
I become a horizon and climb the heights of desire.
I know that we die only once                           and are many times reborn
And I know that death is only useful if we live it through.
I know that the hereafter is this rose
                       this woman
                       and that a human face is the other side of the sky.

Posted on October 7, 2011 at 4:05 PM in About writers, Poetry   |  RSS feed |   Reply   |   Trackback URL