Or This Is How The Clouds Spoke Poem by Khaled Juma

Eyes of almonds left to the seasons, your eyes, they have the freedom of morning's birds filled with love and song, as for the hiding place of the wound, lips are demanding cities of their creators and fire lusts after a djinn inside you who is never still.

Rings of silver enclose the distant sight of the sea, while your feet write the way on modest sand yielding to femininity wherever the wind direction relents, a pair of swallows vie on a wave that washed the scent of the distance from your hair that ever faces difficult choices in its struggle with the breeze.

Vague kinds of burning trees wait calling in a supplication that came too late when
you came late, a glint stored in the memory of the water comforts its summer
eaten away at by the waves' old thought about the seasons, the salt is ablaze in the emptiness of the place where you leave the smell of pain spreading from the beginning of the world to the last thread in your scarf interwoven with suns and the old waiting times for a lover who comes with the small floods through the mercy of the sky that waits the distance of a single colour of your early budding rainbow away, of a shadowy rose trying to know her own self.

I open the morning like a case of illusion, I pull my waiting out of its illusory
bed, I set up your face of all the faces of women on earth to surpass the perfection of my illusory illusion, I button up the tub of mint to preserve your final passage across the canvas of creation before it is created, I see stories and civilizations and prophets and inventions and languages fall from the outpouring of your existence to the mundane worldliness of the flute, passers-by pick them up as charms against joy to save the dove from the talons of the ready falcon nearby.

This is how your image appeared in the water
or this is how the clouds spoke to an unseeing sun!

Translated from Arabic.