For my mother Noor, poet, whose verses I borrow
I hang on to the hem of her dress like a child hanging
On to the string of an immovable kite
I climb her braid like a squirrel climbing a hazelnut tree
...
Not with your tribe's spears i write
for they are dull
but with my nails
words without walls
...
Fawziyya Abu Khalid was born in Riyadh in 1959. She has BAs from universities in Lebanon and the USA, and an MA from King Saud University, where she lectures in Sociology. She has published three books of poetry.)
Butterflies
When you abandoned me,
I didn't need an elegy
because you had planted
a flight of butterflies in my heart
whose path I follow
like a bedouin who knows
how to perfectly trace the footsteps
of his traunt mare.