Above the traffic of the street below, pocking the low periwinkle sky with polka-dots of errant lighting, colour, Maryam was twiddling her thumbs. Outside the wall-wide window, the vehicles in this, one of Beirut’s most uppity zones, made honking sounds like tweezers or like thick blobs of sound on the air, with the odd swift […]
Tag Archives: Poetry
Bomb Shelter
I walk down the stairway of oblivion To where my body and soul have found refuge. The water beneath me surrounding me crawls on my skin, fills my nostrils with heavy damp air. Water brought from the deep dark earth, sucked up by rotating motors, through cold metal pipes… Touch with my bare hands Feel […]
Rabia Al-Adawiyya,Iraqi Sufi and Poet: on Women's Spiritual Experience
Women’s spiritual experience has been suppressed through much of modern history – considering the historical credence given to the masculine perspective of the divine over the earthier, fleshy, relationship-centered perspective of the feminine – and is only now been recovered in its full richness: Julian of Norwich, England, the Ashanti women of Ghana, Lady Kasa of Japan, […]