Al-RUMMAH, Dhu


Of all garments

God blast the veil

it hides the young

and masks the vile

to urge us on.

God blast the veil.


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Mayyah’s beauty

After sleep, she is languor.

The house exudes her fragrance.

She adorns it

when she appears in the morning,

Her anklets and ivory,

as if entwined around a calotrope

stopping the flow

in the bed of a wadi,

With buttocks like a soft dune

over which a rain shower falls

matting the sand

as it sprinkles down.

Her hair-fall

over the lower curve of her back,

soft as the moringa's gossamer flowers,

curled with pins and combed,

With long cheek hollows

where tears flow,

and a lengthened curve at the breast sash

where it crosses and falls.

You see her ear-pendant

along the exposed ridge of her neck,

swaying-out,

dangling over the abyss.

With a red thornberry tooth-twig,

fragrant as musk and Indian ambergris

brought in in the morning,

she reveals

Petals of a camomile

cooled by the night

to which the dew has risen at evening

from Ráma oasis,

Wafting in on all sides

with the earth scent of the garden,

redolent as a musk pod

falling open.

The white gleam of her teeth,

her immoderate laugh,

almost to the unhearing

speak secrets.

She is the cure, she is the disease...