#likhna

[roohfully]

I have returned to you but I have not brought with me the blueness of my soul nor the greenness of reproach nor the blackness of dawn nor the whiteness of drowsiness therefore, have I not returned to you?

—Dunya Mikhail

[roohfully]

Yes, Gilgamesh moves within me— in all the channels I condensed passion, death, travel, ruin, sleeplessness I destroyed my children’s peace and made of my wounds a wedding feast.

—wafaa’ lamrani

[roohfully]

My damp body has already reached noon my luke-warm heart is already in middle years I watch the mist scatter into a feeble sunlight I pass through a thicket of statues open a book from which almost all type-face has fled encourage a very small dream

—Xiao Kaiyu, tr. Michael Day

[roohfully]

I came from afar, morning dew on my lips Saying don’t be childish, you draw back your lips.

—Şükrü Erbaş

[roohfully]

“Even though we use it in Japan, the word ‘nostalgia’ is not a Japanese word. The fact that I can understand [this] even though I don't speak a foreign language means that nostalgia is something we all share. When you live, you lose things. It’s a fact of life. So it's natural for everyone to have nostalgia.”

— Hayao Miyazaki 

[roohfully]

There was a month I called May. When I buried it in papers, passion streamed down, flooding the tiles of the rooms. Herds of gazelles searching for mercy lap it up . . . and I wander about in search of a knife. [ . . ] You are a stranger to me, and your eyes are the foam of distances running like rivers between us.

Don’t ask me about my evaporating grief; perhaps it has become salt with which to doctor wounds.

—Safaa Fathy

[roohfully]

I saddle you with coral with the fusion of writing I find you inside me when alphabets are drowning in suspicion [ . . . ]

With you I double up on myself Your secrets touching my surface

—‘Aisha Arnaout

[roohfully]

Memories ride on horseback like heavily armored knights, pulling prayers and gods behind them down the roads.

Beneath each column a sleeping star burst [ . . . ] on the peak of noon. Its language luminous, its gestures architectural, [ . . . ] a gift from the world of measures.

—Nadia Tuéni