Malfuf wa Malik : Jordanian celebrations of a Khedival Love

Listen to the Jordanian opera singer Zeina Barhoum below:

Just after I wrote in a previous post here that most Arab women tend towards altos, I discovered a whole slew of singers who are not, naturally! what else should happen when anyone reads and believes such silly generalisations :)

‘I’m out of here! Off to Europe!’

The Hallucination of Room

I’ve breathed in your dust through my eyes

smelt the waves lapping at your shore

I’ve heard the silent towers rise

felt skin part as they stabbed the skies

reflection of cranes on glass doors.

Who knows who has the right to call

your mud their bone or blood or home

and what’s that except a set of walls?

one trumpet note and that set falls,

the hallucination of room.

The hallucinations of roofs

and rooms, this nothingness enclosed

and dust breathed in without much proof;

home always, but at a remove,

conflicts, and space juxtaposed.

Not so sucky: Remakes Blogfest

Today Ninja Captain Alex J Cavanaugh and Heather M Gardener are co-hosting the funnest blogfest on Remakes, irresistible! and I'm taking a break from poetry and jumping in.

The raison d'etre and rules  -

Remakes – most of them suck. Now and then, one comes along that is as good as, if not better, than the original. And after all of the bad ones we’ve endured, we want to know about some good ones.

On November 13, 2017, blog about your favorite remake: movie (or television show into movie and vice versa), song, or book – or all three! Post a YouTube video and links where we can find these treasures. Tell us why THIS remake doesn’t suck!

Sign up here or here. Post on November 13 and visit others on the list. Time to unearth those good remakes! 

Q & A

What colour's your poem? she asked.

I said,

mostly blues and greens, some yellow, some red.

Like twilight - maybe a shade of lilac –

some of it fluorescent, some grey and drab

and some parts dissolved small town mud track,

silvered power cuts with a few dabs

of starshine.  Lost fishhooks on dry riverbeds,

waving heat haze and groundnut pyramids.

Some lines white, some unavoidably black.

What colour is your poetry? 

I replied,

some quite see-through, like rainfall on the wide

lit savannahs, on which the long grass feeds

and grows its shadow, neat corn-rowed mornings,

windows missing louvres of glass. Low-speed

smiles, bright swimsuits flashing in the hot springs

in deep forest. The negative space between

points of bison horns, the dragon fly sheen

of streams. And some as opaque as safekeeping.