Morning Romance:

Haha, don't get your hopes up for any racey stories. Although a number of seemingly forbidden things have proven possible here (wink wink), I don't have any steamy romance stories to pass along this morning. Instead, I thought I'd provide you with a snippet of poetry from my most recent Classic Arab Lit. homework. I don't love the class--the professor has no knack for facilitating evocative discussions--but some of the texts are really lovely. This may be my favorite so far:

Excerpt from Dhu al-Rumma's "To the Encampments of Mayya," from Michael Sells' Desert Tracings

"After sleep she is languor.
The house exudes her fragrance.
She adorns it
when she appears in the morning.

As if her anklets and ivory
were entwined around a calotrope
stopping the water's flow
in the bed of a wadi,

With buttocks like a soft dune
over which a rain shower falls
matting the sand
as it sprinkles down,

Her hair-fall
over the lower curve of her back,
soft as the moringa's gossamer flowers,
curled with pins and combed,

With long cheek hollows
where tears flow,
and a lengthened curve at the breast sash
where it crosses and falls.

You see her ear pendant
along the exposed ridge of her neck,
swaying out,
dangling over the abyss.

With a red thornberry tooth-twig,
fragrant as musk and Indian ambergris
brought in in the morning,
she reveals

Petals of a camomile
cooled by the night
to which the dew has risen at evening
from Rama oasis,

Wafting in on all sides
with the earth scent of the garden,
redolent as a musk pod
falling open.

The white gleam of her teeth,
her immoderate laugh,
almost, to the unhearing,
speak secrets.

She is the cure, she the disease,
memory of her, misgiving,
desire dead
were it not for the affliction of distance."

Quite nice, if I do say so myself.