LOVE FRONT
What we learnt of love was from novels, stories, and poems.With poverty, frustration, and narrow horizons we began to fall in love at dreadful ease, and suffer much more easily. Despite that we clung to that love which has no life and existence outside books.
Defeats in love destroyed many of us, dispersed a lot into vagabondage, and caused many others to disappear. Despite that, from time to time some warrior appears; a young man in most cases, waving a tattered flag, mocking the crushing weight of reality, and its bloody grinding mill. He seems sure that his anguish is more valuable than the Mercedes cars which besiege his poor girlfriend, and that true feelings are a mortal weapon which it suffices to draw for the battle to be settled.
We are the disabled victims of this war, feeling for our scars, meanwhile drinking cheap wine with anonymous prostitutes in dark pubs, and pitying every young man who surges from the suburbs of towns riding a gifted poem, and entering the front defenceless.
Abdel-ilah Salhi was born in 1968 in Beni Mellal, Morocco, but spent most of his childhood and adolescence in El Jadida where he completed his education in 1990. He began writing and publishing poetry when he was still a university student, and managed at that early age to tie strong relations with most of the representatives of the “new poetry” generation in Morocco.
Tags: Morocco,
Fès, poetry, Fez,
2 comments:
How true. So few have known true love -- either the giving or the receiving of it. To most it is a game - a pastime - a thing to do to feed the ego or to wear as a banner or to carve a notch.
Those who have known it, also knows that to receive love takes courage, to give love brings pain.
Thank you Kalila, for the poem and the link. I will certainly try and discover Mohammed Bennis.
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