Live Encounters Arab Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Five
November- December 2025
The First Time, poems by Abdullah Mohammed Al-Samati.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
The First Time
The first time
I need to speak my labyrinths
And pack my flute for lands beyond my morrow.
The first time
I find solace in the mystic woven through my being
To utter more than this sky of my solitary prayers.
The first time I step toward myself
I let meaning run wild like scattered gifts
And draw a longer song from my soul with tenderness.
I remember the brief countryside
Branches rebelling around me
As Autumn leaned upon the arm of promise.
Now I see the sky as a nocturnal garden
Where God’s own suns lie sleeping
And stars, when they awaken, clothe my hands.
A world that draws its longing out like a linden tree
If it wept
The soul’s bird chirped into warbling song
Trilling past the lashes of a hymn.
The earthbound in me will wail
With a wild one’s courage, who abandons his stones to the echo
Spilling the wound of my expansion.
For the palms, for the prayers, I’ve bared my cells
My lost one found me yet found no worthy neck
For my majesty.
And the hell of nerves now drips away
Here I scatter every devil that stood cruciform
Upon the face of my sin
Through my renewal.
No other tavern
Whose drunkenness caresses a body curled
At superstition’s elbow
Everything flees
In my shackles.
A woman like you
To a tree, she might only mean a glimmer from a golden branch
That passed by a bird’s shore and then broke.
A woman like you
To the sea, she might only mean
A tide in the mind of the grass sleeping in a wet moon.
But to me, specifically, she means
What I can make of my ghost in this world: images.
A woman like you
Made of light… of diamond fuzz, and the pupils of the sun, and the lashes of bells when Sundays chime
And from the voice of minarets on Friday.
Like you
Made of wax, and hills of vision, like you
Made of basil spreading through the necks of nymphs.
And like you
Made of a heavenly cluster walking
Through the body of love’s hell.
And like you
She draws my sorrows, makes my joys a destiny
A woman like you
Would have refined nine senses in my body
Would have soared to the farthest reaches of my coronary artery
And would have prayed for me like a mother
And shown me mercy like a father
She would command me, and I would obey with disobedience
And she would tell me
The secrets of the earth when we get lost at the turns of things
And she would tell me
About an unknown orchard
And wonders about love
Or kisses
That, from the length of time stuck on our lips
Might one day turn into a wall
A woman like you
How do I call her
To kill me or bring me to life
How does she bless me
And baptize me
How does she search my depths
For a lost star
And sift through my tissues
For a homeland
Searching among my ashes for a slope, hills, and peaks.
A woman like you
Might make me captive to love
And might leave me suicidal
Might grant me a divan from the unseen
House me in a palace of marble.
But I
Am searching for a green moon
That throws me a folk song every evening
Dresses me in shirts like the simple folk
And feeds me a dream
Waters me with music, from wonders
String by string.
A woman like you
I will call her my first love
And try, in all of God’s lands
To travel towards the features of her eyes.
© Abdullah Mohammed Al-Samati
Abdullah Mohammed Al-Samati is a distinguished Egyptian poet, literary critic, and researcher. With a prolific career spanning over three decades, he has authored 14 poetry collections and 35 critical books. Al-Samati has also significantly contributed to cultural journalism, writing for numerous Egyptian and Arab publications. He is a frequent participant in literary conferences and poetry readings across the Arab world.
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.