Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2026
Open a window in the stone, poems Touria Majdouline.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
Open a window in the stone
A homeland that doesn’t begin with your name,
exile.
A day that doesn’t rise from your lips
stone, stretching its limbs.
In memory, a whole universe, and I am alone.
I don’t know my alphabet, never reach my end.
Returning from the crossroads of illusions,
returning from the silence of a mirage.
I fill half the glass for you,
the other half for a metaphor of the poem.
I dream with half my imagination,
leaving the other half for a new possibility.
An orchard of cherries inside my mind
so where does the cactus grow?
You, homeland-exile,
sit across from me.
Let me settle my quarrel with you
pluck the thorns of speech from your lips,
trim the letters of your body,
prune the little branches of joy from your secrets,
so my imagination can reclaim you whole,
drag you like a river to the earth’s wide bed!
My pulse stops at the edges of your name,
loafing in my blood like a lazy wind.
And I ask:
how can you vanish, when you’re so deeply fixed in my eyes?
Sit across from me,
raise your glass high.
Come, let’s exchange the ends of love.
Let your narcissus rest a little,
open your seasons to a flock of words.
This is my blood, darker than a stranger’s night.
This is my voice, like rain-soaked wind.
My eyes have burned, and still
I stare at pain in the darkness of the soul.
I sit at the start of my exile
one part of me watching another
and oh, how alone my soul is,
dancing in the darkness of light!
Be whatever you want,
let the letters sleep without their dots.
Take off the coat of darkness from your sky,
so violets can appear,
fields of bitter oranges and Bisan can appear.
What’s left of the days’ story
except a bitter illusion and a monotonous rhythm?
What’s left except the thud of hooves
of a poem fleeing into a dream
except the feeling of fragility inside stone,
a deluded desire and a restless imagination?
So, tell me:
what makes you sit in the poem’s courtyard,
watching its damp fantasy like a night watchman?
O homeland where unknowns stagger
your glass is empty,
your hand full of farewells,
escorting illusion to its last supper.
So let me open a window in the stone,
so beautiful losses don’t preoccupy me
more than they should.
O homeland of jasmine,
hurl the unknown inside me away.
Don’t mistake the meaning.
Don’t play the stone’s role.
Don’t hurl flames into the guts.
It’s enough that I burn like a garden of fire
between the noise of memory and the boredom of forgetting.
Don’t let the wind pant behind me like childhood.
I won’t stand in the poem alone.
I will weave a carnation coat
and lend it my body.
I will provoke the gods
to awaken desire in my language,
so the sky trembles against the trunk of the earth.
I will put on the shirt of the wind
that has kept me company so long,
and say to it:
O wind,
from now until the final departure,
be my longed-for bed.
The shadow of the absent
Don’t draw the features of the night alone.
Go to the lote-tree of light
light as the shadow of a rose.
Reach your hands toward the ceiling of your soul.
Learn the joy of dancing,
for evenings pass quickly,
and you only want to mend this heart and walk on.
You want to know: who struck the sea with thirst?
Who set the body of fire ablaze, so it burned through the firewood of your nights?
So,
throw away your old shadows.
You have every reason for temptation
to paint a rainbow
and enter the cherry orchard
the cherries that grow between your hands,
in presence and in absence.
The cherries that keep nature’s secret
to declare it in your presence.
You won’t need a grapevine to forget.
You are already prepared for forgetting
prepared to be the shadow of drowsiness
and the shadow of an absence
that follows the iridescence of meaning
in the nakedness of the world.
You won’t need another night
to make a dream and live inside it.
You have the grapes of noon
hung from the ceiling of your soul.
You have what lips write on the wall of a glass.
For you: the harvest and the playing,
and whatever of the body’s light flickered in your eyes.
You are the sovereign of this body!
A seed of light is enough
to leave your shadow and return to you
like suddenly closing the bow of remembering
and plucking the feathers of speech from the stone of silence.
And you don’t need to rush the season of departure.
The sea is busy with the wave,
the wave busy with the sand,
the sand absorbed in gathering its remains
and drawing a map for the sea.
Only the sea knows the secret of the drowned!
And if you find no opening in the night to pass into your dream,
paint a wing for the day and slip your last desire
into the sheath of noon.
And if, for example, the pain of loss blocks you,
and you see departure in the fractures of the horizon,
and the face of absence widening
if you see the possibility of ash
in the bundle of fire in your hand
then don’t draw the features of the night alone.
Don’t scatter a tear on the bench of evening.
Don’t be other than yourself.
You are the river that gives its flood
to grass, roses, and cactus.
It doesn’t break its appointment with tree and stone.
It doesn’t hide its nakedness or its hunger for roots.
It doesn’t forcefully answer the call of the fire.
Don’t be other than yourself.
Be a homeland where I renew my stay with every longing.
Be my exile
I write letters to the homeland inside you.
And it’s alright if you stop a while at the heart’s balcony
and enter the dome of passion,
leaving your shadow hanging in absence
like an exhausted journey on the wing of the wind.
Don’t hide the rose in your blood.
It’s not certain that candle resembles you.
Your eyes are prophetic, and acacias grow next to your name.
There is no room for moaning inside your core.
Oh you
you who are multiple around me
don’t wait for anyone.
Don’t stare too long into the mirrors of pain.
Name the wounds after their owners,
and bury them near your old name.
Let the dream walk toward its dream.
And stay as you are
forever imagined.
© Touria Majdouline
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.
Touria Majdouline is a distinguished Moroccan poet, novelist, and university professor with a Ph.D. in Criticism and Modern Arts. An award-winning writer, she has received the Nazik Al-Malaika Poetry Prize (2011), the ISESCO Prize for Cultural Work Development (2012), and the International Excellence Prize in Cultural Work (2024). She is an active cultural figure, serving as a founding member of the Association of Creative Women in Mediterranean Countries, head of the Moroccan-Andalusian Friendship Association (Ibn Rushd Forum), and an advisory board member of the Lebanese magazine Manarat. Her acclaimed works include poetry collections like A Sky That Slightly Resembles Me (2005, translated into Spanish) and Nothing More Beautiful (2023), the novel The Trace of the Bird (2025), and the critical study Vision and the Mask (2016).