When darkness blooms,
Who sings in me?
Sweet is the scent,
Too well remembered
Like birdsong in the night
Its cadence takes my hand,
My drowning
Is but a flight
Back into you
In Jerusalem's walls
A crack,
My heart
On golden domes a light,
My eyes
And always the morning
And always
The night
Eastern and heavy
The night
Me,
'Oud and kamancheh and ney
My heart,
The daf:
A drum that beats
In the breath of all life
In all things living, my heart
That craves your breath, my love
Take me back to the sanctuaries,
To the streets,
To the souqs
And walk their roads with me,
For I am lost in my memory
I have been gone for too long
How shall I know my way?
The children and the children's children
Were born and saw old age and I
Have but the scars of memory
And my name has become
A distant song on an isle,
A stranger's reminiscence
And a sailor's lost soul
Too well remembered to find peace
Ah, my heart!
In Persia, in Hindustan
Birds sprang from within you
To fill every sky with their song,
At the hour of sunset
Their dark flocks arise
In the tongues of Sindh and Khuzestan,
In Dari and Marathi,
Roumeika, Arvanitika
Their cries will summon me
They seize my depth and carry it
Across the seas, like flames of heaven,
And a thousand Jerusalems
Sear my wrists and my heart
Bleeds into yours, my love
Once in a time that was no time
There was and there was not
An Eastern land, a world, a longing
Once there was and there wasn't
This me
And God saw that it was good
And now
We are night-blooming Jasmine
And the day there was
Is lost
But the moment
When eyes and skin and hands
Tremble in recognition
Endures in all eternity
Lucid the moment
When my lips encountered your hair
And in a thousand tongues
It spoke a thousand words
And my sacred Jerusalem lives,
Drunk with love,
In the qibla of your eyes
And should I not be
buried in the earth of my homeland,
Then I shall live
In every sigh
And be buried in your rapture
And where words fail,
The ocean
Shall unleash stream upon stream
And where walls bar my way,
There
The heavens
Shall open
One sweet night
It will come to pass
And we shall be birds among birds
You, love,
And I,
And all like us
And Jerusalem then
Shall be filled with our dreams
Her sanctuaries, her streets, her souqs
Shall remember us then
And our presence, my love,
Shall be like life itself,
Which dafs of living skin have sung
In moments preceding
And outlasting
All time
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