Love

To my Wife Yasmeen
M.A.R. Habib

I shall fall in
Love with
You again.
For the first time
Your black eyes
Across a sunlit court,
As you sit drinking tea
And feel my secret gaze.

I wish we could happen again,
This time through chance, through
A world’s rhymeless wonder.

O let me see you
As an unknown face
From an unknown past,
An unveiled vision.
The shock of your beauty
Dazzling, unfamiliar,
Stinging, bringing
Love to my weary eyes.

 

Valentine’s Day
M.A.R. Habib

I wish I could say, I love you
Like before; but I
Don’t. I wish I had your twenty-year old body,
Cheeks soft and fresh, lips pouting,
And eyes too dark, fathomed in uncertainty.
Beneath that wholesome surface,
Fire.
Beneath that sweetness, beneath that honesty,
Desire:
A turning outward, a desperation...

I know you have it in you,
Just close your eyes
To your past, to your family,
Your boring worn-out traditions; step
Outside of time, beyond
The reason of religion. Step into
Your self, the self that will not be gagged or
Dragged by centuries
Of mere words, the self that
Is still free. Bring her,
Like a new bride, bring
Her to me, smiling,
And let me with my heavy passion
Suffocate that smile, releasing its
Heat.

 

Yet Another Valentine’s Day
For Yasmeen, 2007
M.A.R. Habib

Here we go again: they want flowers,
Heart-shaped chocolates, rosy ornaments,
Dinner with candles, a
Holding of hands, another year pretending
Our marriage is perfect.

And when you married me, you must have
Known I would never do
These things that are done
By other men.

And now, some years later, you know
I will not falsely praise you; I will not
Speak to you with hallmark cards, or
Place diamonds on your hand; I will
Not promise that I will be true or sing
Your praise in stupid rhymes.

And we are too old to pretend:
Our marriage is not perfect: sometimes
You want to be held when all I want to hold
Is books;
You never like my cooking or cleaning;
You hate my driving, especially when I tear
Through red lights; I am impatient, selfish, proud
And I don’t like it when you talk loud.

And, after all, there is no need to pretend:
No consumerism shall consume
What I feel for you.
All the words on all the cards in all the world
Could not express your beauty.
And my words of love will be
Whispered to no woman
In all of heaven or all of earth.
Only you.

 

To Yasmeen
February 14, 2003
M.A.R. Habib

What I have loved in you
Is a world shimmering, like a white sea,
Unmoved, sailing upon itself,
Whose unknown depth of richness
Pearls from below.

In my heart, I ache for you
Like land seething, seeking its own shape
Substance craving form,
Idea knowing itself as end.

And I have nothing – no substance, no form, no
Words
To sing again in Love’s dimension:
After your eyes,
After your beauty,
All language is lost;
All is shadow, all is chaos, borne
Helpless on Love’s endless voice.

 

To Yasmeen, after Nine Years
M.A.R. Habib

            The Years have not dared to
Touch your Beauty
Which sings in the music of eternal spheres;
In you, all is harmony, radiance, wholeness;
In you, Being knows its end, its first and final cause:
There are no edges, no shadows, no burden of excess,
Your stillness moves and your motion stills.

            Who am I who could love you?
Who could outform space and time,
Outsense intuition,
Outreach the infinities of Reason?

            The vast cycles will move without my words;
The ancient mysteries still sing,
Your voice flowing in their silent notes:
The universal poem
Which Love, not I, can sing.

 

Valentine War
M.A.R. Habib

And who will write songs of love for you
When war has scarred all song.
When the bombs have burned enough children,
scorched their cities, disfigured their deserts,
When the tyrants have played out their game of oil and empire,
Leaving the earth’s fields drenched in blood, the air poisoned,
the atmosphere shaking with terror, prisons echoing with torture;
When the greedy kings of commerce have squeezed their grip
on the resources of the world;
When the hate-spewing media have drained the human voice
Of all song:
What love is left in me?

What love has left in me I leave for love:
No commerce will it have with the hatred,
The demon, that possesses the vile voice
Of self-anointing leaders. Let their violent words
Pass over us, beneath us, mere noise; our love
Will not yield to their anger, will not see itself
Mirrored in their fuming, bitter, scowling faces.

Let them blacken the green earth, burn up its beauty,
Let them darken the sky with their death-seeking missiles;
They cannot take our world from us; we will be there
When they are finished. We will rebuild what the monsters have deformed;
Our love will stand when their hatred has spent itself;
And when their voices are silent, hoarse with screaming,
We shall sing those songs of love once more.
Then, my love, shall I write love songs for you.

 

For My Cousins
On their Wedding
March 29, 2002
M.A.R. Habib

Love will find itself,
Knowing its true image,
Beyond sea and mountain,
Through the mighty spheres of cosmos
It hears its own music:
Lost in the harmony of Self.

Such was Love
Which brought you to me
Deeper than race or culture, higher than faith
Blessing our union in the strength of fate,
Written in the heavens, in timeless song.

The stars have always known your beauty,
Walking in the eternal garden,
Your soul shines from afar;
And now, hand in hand with mine,
It shall move in still perfection:
In our endless harmony
Love has found its face.

 

Old Flame
M.A.R. Habib

Beautiful, O woman not mine, you
Awake in me that old passion, the demon
I thought, with Plato, lay dormant, mimicking
Death; you cannot know how many years
Of memory you bring to live again in me; but
It is all vain; there is no purpose now; the god of love
Has fled, left us, abandoned in our selfishness;
There are no more lonely haunts, romantic spots
Where we – you and I – could share each other, no
Caves or inlets or islands beyond the reach of crazed capital
Suffusing its poisonous vapour over the fields of
The possible; all before us is desert;
The rule of fear and perpetual war to prolong
The work of power, of greedy hands, who have reached
Into our very hearts and attuned all passion to practical things,
Scorching the soul’s own terrain within the general conflagration
Of self-interest; I cannot love you, for I too am mechanism, who can barely
Feel my own existence; barely rise from the torpor of self-deceit:
My steel heart will not care for itself:
How could it care
For a fragile thing like you?

 

An Autumn Garden
M.A.R. Habib

Fall is nowhere
More beautiful than here: green leaves
Tipped with red; rich orange divesting
Into yellow; green lawns strewn
With red and gold; the air still,
And the breezes quiet through the high trees
Against a calming sky of rare blue.

And your garden reclines in a beauty of its own:
Your eyes, no longer young, have seen sorrow;
Your mouth, no longer kissed so passionately,
Is sweet in its aching; your cheek is still soft, still burns
With love, still yearns
For something more.

And when will Autumn come to me,
Bringing its mists and its cold breath;
When will I be free
Of wanting you, and waiting
And waiting
For death.

 

Too Late
M.A.R. Habib

If, in ten years, you should come to me, broken,
Your following relationships failed, your
Thighs bloated with cellulite, your cheeks fattened, your spouse
Uncaring; if then you should tell me
You wished you had given yourself to
Me, that night, all those years ago, when
Sitting on a couch I had touched your cheek; if
The emptiness of all these years is what it has taken
To make you wise, to open your
Eyes to what you really want; if in
Dreams between then and now, you have known
Your real desire; if it is now, in your diminished
Beauty and heightened knowing that you wish to give yourself to me,
Then know: know that it was not your beauty
That I wanted, nor now your wisdom: I craved                    
Compassion, expressed in tender touch: the very thing your years
Will not let me offer now.