Strangers We Meet

We meet
And who said we would never meet
Know nothing about love

Here we are
You, rooted in your Canaanite land
Me, a Berber gazelle
Descendents of revolutionaries and martyrs
With our pale letters full of absence’s ache
With the weight of days on our foreheads
And our secret fields of desire
Still green

When time suspends in your presence
I say your name like I recite a verse
With my eyes closed
I discover its shape in the light
Listen to the music of its letters
You repeat mine over and over
Like a secret spell
Or a song you learned in your tender childhood
That still echoes in your memory

Like two strangers we meet
After a hundred years of love
Our bodies forget their borders slowly
And our solitudes annihilate each other
When we touch

– Imen Benyoub

Author: Jamie Dedes

Jamie Dedes is a Lebanese-American poet and free-lance writer. She is the founder and curator of The Poet by Day, info hub for poets and writers, and the founder of The Bardo Group, publishers of The BeZine, of which she was the founding editor and currently a co-manager editor with Michael Dickel. Ms. Dedes is the Poet Laureate of Womawords Press 2020 and U.S associate to that press as well. Her debut collection, "The Damask Garden," is due out fall 2020 from Blue Dolphin Press. View All Posts