Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2026
The Rose, poems Dima Mahmoud.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
The Rose
The rose is snow that melted from a mountain peak
breaking free from oxygen starvation and low pressure.
As a reaction to repression, it opens its arms to uncoupling,
to embracing photosynthesis and the sting of bees.
The rose acknowledges no absolute,
so it practices contradiction twice:
when its promises wither yet are fiercely green,
and when it’s scentless yet raises its voice in color.
The rose submits to no logic.
Yesterday I saw yellow roses closing their petals
as light receded at dusk,
while my grandmother’s violets in her garden, once upon a time,
only opened their lips at night.
No one dares accuse the rose of offending modesty
not even by a fingertip.
The rose has sex when crowds gather in public squares,
in the thick of festivals and carnivals:
the male pollen sticks to the female stigma
while every eye and every 3D, 4D camera
can watch live in the finest detail.
The rose is a backyard to the facades of civilization, dependency, or
nationalization.
It might appear as giant wreaths
a bourgeois ritual where delegations and noble families flock.
Yet a single roadside rose
serves those under the threat of poverty,
while their crises, dreams, and prayers huddle in the damp.
The rose knows no paranoia,
no fear of heights or dark places,
no split between opposites or between theory and reality.
It adapts quickly, grows regardless,
keeping its fragrance and color intact.
The rose has no Oedipus complex.
It stands at the same distance from everyone,
bears no premeditated murder plot or anything of the sort,
and always maintains a balance that ensures its efficacy and wholeness.
The rose isn’t subject to racial discrimination,
recognizes no identities,
uses no double standards.
Scent and color in the rose arrive at the same moment,
equally and fully,
to black and white, to peaceful and violent,
despite the crushing crowd.
The rose is the chrysalis stage of music clustering together.
It rebels against itself with a sharp uprising,
sloughs off the circumstances of symbolism,
gives birth to fragrance or spirit.
At the peak, color melts from its core and it drowns in color,
and fragrance climbs the ladder of fulfillment and eternity!
Then she walks to him
The girl who planted her heart in her eyes,
to season time and ghosts.
She stuffed her soul with song-sheets behind the walls
until it became roomy enough.
Then she walked, fragile, carrying small pigeons like talismans,
feeding patience with her beak—hoping it might endure.
Was her memory larger than the world,
storing more grief than she should have,
so that she overflows with this much tenderness
and paints gardens with her antidote?
Or did she absorb ancient fatigue,
cramped as orchards with fever
cheeks growing in the water of longing,
eternity dozing, watching her
like a broody hen packing an enormous suitcase of candles
and rivers of pictures, from thirty storms and one house ago
carrying it all, then walking to him.
We do not resemble this world
The whitewashed one that lies in wait for us, washes us before we undress.
This complacency doesn’t mean much
as we poke out the world’s eye with a needle.
The same world that jumps like a gleeful clown
is the one aiming its nuclear and napalm warheads dead-on,
while opportunism hobbles through its guts without hesitation or shame.
What would happen, I mean
if we swapped halves of ourselves in a defiant attempt?
If we said: Butter is half of society,
and with a paintbrush we colored our upper halves green
to support environmentalists
and I swapped my leg for a lamppost to feel the abandonee’s pain,
while your leg became a hammer in a lathe-boy’s hand?
What if we said: “Nothing outside the text”?
Nothing inside it either!
The egg is still an egg,
and poets are stupid middlemen between reality and art.
Should I lend you my bra strap now in the name of equality?
And have my picture taken with your pipe
as an unjustified longing for a bourgeois ritual?
And between Trotsky and Lenin,
we can turn the sickles upward, smear them blue,
in a surrealist act, to pull the sky down,
explore the metaphysics of the next twenty years,
strategize against wars, labor strikes,
bear flu,
organize relief carnivals and elections,
and lure investors from the Tibetan Plateau.
When your mobile rang as you slaughtered my two white doves,
I didn’t mean to stop your hands from bloodying themselves.
I only meant to say:
It’s not just contradictions that keep the world up at night.
You and I do too
Even though we are as alike as two scissor blades!
© Dima Mahmoud
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.
Dima Mahmoud is an Egyptian poet and a professional voiceover artist, broadcaster, and radio actress. A graduate in Computer Science and Statistics from King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, she has authored several poetry collections, including Spiritual Braids (2015), Challenging the Horizon with a Violin (2017), With Tenderness, He Inscribes His Papyrus (2021), Bitten Fingers in a Bag (which won second prize in the Helmy Salem Award for New Poetry in 2021), and A Shadow and a Tremor – Songs for the Wind (2023). Two further collections are forthcoming. Her work has been translated into numerous languages—including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, and Chinese—and has appeared in international journals, websites, and printed anthologies. She has actively participated in local, Arab, and global poetry and cultural festivals.