Absence

Each Friday we provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. There you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Anastasia Suen.

You can visit her here at Picture Book of the Day.


(Moorish tiles at the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain; this
pattern in a tessellation of tiles is said to have inspired
the Dutch artist M. C. Escher)

Today’s poem is found in Poems of Arab Andalusia, an anthology of verses translated by Cola Franzen from the Spanish versions of poems from tenth- to thirteenth-century southern Spain.

The poems had been originally put together by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Sa’īd al-Maghribī in 1243. He collected poems “whose idea is more subtle than the West Wind, and whose language is more beautiful than a fair face.” The poets included African, Jewish, and Berber authors, all writing in Arabic.

The translation into Spanish was done by Emilio García Gómez, who discovered the Arabic manuscript in 1928 in Cairo, Egypt.

ABSENCE

Every night I scan
the heavens with my eyes
seeking the star
that you are contemplating.

I question travelers
from the four corners of the earth
hoping to meet one
who has breathed your fragrance.

When the wind blows
I make sure it blows in my face:
the breeze might bring me
news of you.

I wander over roads
without aim, without purpose.
Perhaps a song
will sound your name.

Secretly I study
every face I see
hoping against hope
to glimpse a trace of your beauty.

~ Abū Bakr al-Turtūshī (1059-1127), poet from Eastern Andalusia