“You Have It Now And That Is All Your Life Is; Now. There Is Nothing Else Than Now. There Is Neither

The many wrongly addressed letters. Then the unsent ones. Followed by the unwritten ones. And at last — again — the poem: the breathed breve... a few syllables too long. — (Wave shorts. Wave troughs. No crests at all.)

– Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

Gabriela Mistral, tr. by Langston Hughes, from Selected Poems; “Quietness,”

Adonis, from Selected Poems; “This Is My Name” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

acosmist

(noun)

one who believes that nothing exists.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Poem of the End: V (tr. by Elaine Feinstein)

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

انحصار

Inhisar

Reliance

Who do I turn to when I find myself rolling in the deep, the trenches from where it's next to impossible to get out? Who can I rely upon, who will not forsake me when the chips are down? Aren't these and more, the questions we keep asking ourselves as we grow through the years? Sometimes these are tied with the people, be it our family or friends, and then again, more often than not, this becomes tied with the one we fall in love with. We tell ourselves that they will be there for us, no matter what, that we can rely upon them. While that may be true in many cases, it doesn't always work out that way. On top of that, we can't always rely on our own selves either, because we can't be our own critics when that is what might be needed at some point. So, we do need to find something or someone else, a higher entity, upon whom we can rely upon, without any judgements.

- DG

Andrée Chedid, from “Terre et Poésie,” quoted in Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women (edited by Kamal Boullata).

T.S. Eliot, from “III. The Fire Sermon”, Collected Poems, 1909-1962

Aeschylus’ (?) Prometheus Bound (tr. David Grene)