By Fadi Abu Deeb

(First published in Inventory Journal, No. 9, Princeton University)

In the midst of their desert city
Your chamber is a headland,
Plunged into the depths
of un-sensed waters
Among the cement that multiplies like unbounded cancerous dunes,
Your home is an oneiric oasis with a sun and a moon
And you’re as dewy as an unpopulated city on shore
Shady as an antediluvian oak
A recluse, like Atlantis
after having repelled her giants.
And I am a traveler
Sickened by their sun and moon
A Bedouin who decided to isolate himself settling beside the ocean
A shepherd in the higher intellectual Galilee
A Pythagorean, who escaped
from the Agoras of the orators and elders and brokers