Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2026.
Homeland of the Heart, poem by Habiba Mohamadi.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
Homeland of the Heart
I
My homeland’s sun is too fierce to bear
That’s why I dwell in the shelter of its light,
With half my soul at rest,
And half set adrift,
And half all longing,
By a basin of still water.
Do I dissolve, or do I swim? It’s all the same,
For water alone is always true.
I wrap myself in layers of meaning,
A ghost I flee, a dream I can’t hold.
This is how the spaces between us keep us bound,
Until life leans down, cupping us gently in its palm.
We drink a few spare drops of life’s honey,
Only for its sweetness to undo us in the end.
We were born of mothers
Who bore us alone. A lonely rock once held me;
Sisyphus clutched the hem of my shirt
Together we rolled that stone
Upward,
Downward.
Just so, we turn the great wheel of meaning,
The music of life passing between us,
Until each of us becomes a mountain of memory.
But it doesn’t matter—we make our meaning from life’s gravel.
Home is the ritual that remains,
A solitary word in its own dictionary.
Home is the heart of who we are.
Its language
Is love.
II
Somewhere between my bones,
A tear falls. A strand of longing
Wraps around me like a necklace,
And I fasten my grief with it.
Meanwhile, my soul keeps asking,
“From what star did we both fall,
That we should meet here?”
III
In the warm coral of your being,
A few of my poems live,
Full of secrets. Yet when I rise
A luminous moon,
My womanhood calls out
While in the courtyard of time,
A girl plays with a glass sphere
Your heart calls the moon.
© Habiba Mohamadi
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.
Habiba Mohamadi is a well-known Algerian poet, writer, and academic who writes modern poetry and opens her text to experimentation between the flash poem, the painting, the fragment, and the epigram. She has many poetry collections and has a long history of writing for the Egyptian, Algerian, and Arab press. She has several collections of poetry and intellectual works. The most famous of them are: “The Kingdom and Exile,” “Fractures of the Face,” “The Overflow of Exile,” “Time in the Open,” “Anklets,” and other works, and some of her works have been translated into foreign languages such as English, French, and Spanish. And her latest intellectual publications: A book about the relationship between poetry and philosophy in philosophical thought, with “Nietzsche” as an example, entitled The Lust for Wisdom, the Madness of Poetry, issued by the Egyptian General Book Authority. She was honored in Algeria, and in several Arab and foreign countries, including, but not limited to, an honor from the Supreme Council of the Arabic Language in Algeria for her excellence in writing in the Arabic language and her efforts to preserve it. Her last honor was from the General Syndicate of the Egyptian Writers Union in 2023, and she was awarded the Union Shield as the first Arab writer to receive the Egyptian Writers Union Shield.