Oh, the lifetimes it will live!

 

I get that all flesh is grass, quite apart

from the lofty meanings of transience

I get it the green that sprouts must also dry

but inside my head, deep down inside my heart

there’s a rejection of both faith and science

the decrees whatever blooms must also die.

Spare me the lectures, I’ve heard all that before -

my flesh is the grass and the herbivore.

Yes it dies and no it doesn’t, lives beyond

many lifetimes and treads the grass it’s made of,

how do you measure its lifespan as finite? –

make it fit into words to correspond

exactly as given, sans leeway and love,

demarcate its death and its depth and height?

Malfuf wa Malik: Min Zamaan

First off, here is Farah Yousef, a young Syrian singer, a runner up at the Arab Idol 2013. Read more about her here.

Today I am posting an old, old short story I wrote for a guest post the same year Farah here bagged the runner up's place. Wrote it a few months before I left Cairo. The blog where this was published first, transitioned to a different platform, and then my computer broke when I moved from Cairo in 2014, and not all my files were recovered from it, so this story was lost to me. I know, I am bad at housekeeping both real and virtual!  But today something clicked in my brain (talk about tubelights!) and I recovered this from a place I hadn't bothered to sift through before - the sent folder. So, here it is, for the final installment of MwM ~

Min Zamaan*