Disastrous are disasters. Paradise is such a lonely place that we are doomed, anyway. But at the meeting point of its rivers the horizon is always enlarged, the imagination unleashed.
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Love creates sand-storms and loosens reality’s building blocks. Its feverish energy takes us into the heart of mountains. Sometimes, a frozen moon illuminates frozen fields.
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There’s so much life around me, and I will have to leave.

Etel Adnan is a poet of recent discovery. I selected a book of poems entitled, Night from the shelf-row of poetry books. Her written lines spoke to me so I decided to dedicate more time to contemplate Adnan’s poetry.

The span of Adnan’s life, 24 February 1925 – 14 November 2021. In 2003, Adnan was named “arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today” by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

Adnan’s mother Greek Orthodox from Smyrna and her father was a Sunni Muslim-Turkish, and a high-ranking Ottoman officer. She grew up speaking Greek and Turkish, was educated in French and studied English in her youth. Adnan received a degree in Philosophy from the University of Paris, continued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. Returning to Lebanon after teaching in the U.S. she worked as a journalist and cultural editor for a French-language newspaper in Beirut.

In addition to her writing, Adnan made visual works in a variety of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited at galleries across the world.

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As for these lines, it seems to me that we upper middle-class Americans inhabit a paradise of sorts, a fluke of timing and history, of affluence, of good fortune, – an ideal that cannot, is not sustainable. Do the majority of humans alive in the world enjoy a daily routine like mine, beginning at Starbucks? They do not. All are doomed, one way or another, I think to myself while at Starbucks writing this…

Love is a story of passion that must loosen the building blocks of reality, as new beginnings are called for, an end, so that we may begin again! Love is like a fever, an “ever aching need” a compulsion to consider afresh, ‘who I am.’ And I’ll ask the question, “who are you?”

Is it time for me to leave? Not yet, – but soon, soon enough.

I/we cannot stay here…