Poetry: Ashraf AboArafe
I did not love you
as people love people,
but as a seeker loves a station—
knowing it,
yet never reaching it.
I came to you
not as desire,
not as promise,
not as a hand reaching out,
but as a broken soul
that knows the way to God
when the world goes astray.
I loved you
because you were meaning
when language failed me,
and calm
when life became
an exam with no answers.
In you
I learned that piety
is not fear but modesty,
that goodness
is not an act but a nature,
and that selflessness
is a silent bleeding
seen only by God.
You were courage
that did not shout,
and a nobility
that unsettled me—
for I was never
as pure
as you.
I confess…
I saw you
and arranged my defeat.
I heard the call to prayer,
and you preceded the supplication.
I reached dawn
and found you
closer than my own name.
Fourteen years
I carried this secret
like a verse
I was not permitted to recite.
Every news of you
was a renewed test
of patience.
I searched for you
in women
and found only your echo.
I searched within myself
and found only my weakness.
I am the one
who crossed sixty,
still learning
how to stop the heart
from hoping—
only for it
to beat again.
I sought no ruin,
no temptation,
no theft of peace.
I only wished
to say to the dream:
I saw you.
When I tried to sever,
my soul bled.
When I tried to forget,
the heart shattered.
Nothing remained
but this pain
that performs ablution
and prays.
I do not ask you of this world—
the world is too small
for a heart that has known you.
Nor do I contend with a decree
God wrote
without my name.
I only hang my love
on the gate of heaven
and say:
O Lord…
if she was not my share on earth,
then make her
my tranquility in Paradise.
Let her pass by me there
without fear,
without reckoning,
without apology.
Let me see her
as she was created,
before days exhausted her,
before I learned patience.
If this love is a sin,
then I repent of it
to You.
And if it is a secret,
You know best
what hearts conceal.
I did not abandon her,
nor can I.
Her love will remain
until death,
and rise with me
as a prayer
that never dies.
Forgive me…
I did not betray you.
I only loved you
in the form of hope.
And to the keeper of the garden—
I raise my hands,
not in apology
but in surrender,
and leave judgment
to God.
