لا ترقبي بعد يومي غدا

Notes

1. Lā tarqubī baʿda yawmī ghadā, literally 'do not watch for a tomorrow after my day'. Raqaba means to keep watch, to wait with eyes fixed on something. 'My day' is the lover's present coming, the moment he offers; to wait beyond it for some better tomorrow is to lose it. The line closes the poem and turns its whole invitation into an urgent 'now or never'. ↩
2. ʿAllan wa-nahlan: nahal is the first drink a thirsty camel or traveller takes at the water, ʿalal the second drink that follows it. The pair is a set Arabic expression for drinking one's fill, again and again, so the whisper promises to quench her thirst completely. The verb yarwīki, 'quenches you', can also mean 'recounts you, recites you', a sense that suits a whisper and the poetry of the next line. ↩
3. Ṣahwa is the part of a horse's back where the rider sits, and 'mounting the ṣahwa' of something means seizing it, riding it boldly. Here she is asked to ride the bushrayāt, glad tidings, as one rides a steed, picking up the galloping horses a few lines earlier. ↩
4. In Arabic the wing is an image of shelter, tenderness and protection: to lower or spread one's wing over someone is to take them under one's care. The wing also carries the sense of flight, which the next lines develop as the breaking of all bounds. ↩
5. Arabic has qayd al-zamān al-makān, 'the shackle of time, place', with no 'and' between the two nouns. The missing conjunction fuses them into a single bond, as if time and place were one prison, and the wing breaks both at once. ↩
6. Manāfī, 'places of exile', stands for all the distances that keep lovers apart. Longing is defined as their inṣihār, a smelting or fusing, as metal melts in fire: in longing, the separate exiles of the two lovers melt and flow together into one. ↩
7. The question is rhetorical, meaning that passion is worth nothing unless it crowns the lover. Here the address turns from the woman to a 'you' that is masculine in Arabic (yutawwijka, sayyidā): most naturally any lover in general, though it can also be read as the poet addressing himself. Al-warā is an elevated word for all created beings, mankind at large. ↩
8. Ghuṣṣa bihā al-baḥr: ghaṣṣa bi- means to choke on something stuck in the throat. The sea chokes on the wreckage yet cannot swallow it, that is, cannot sink it, and so it survives to reach her shores. The pronoun here is feminine, although ḥuṭām, 'wreckage', is masculine; it is best taken as the wreckage thought of as a mass of broken pieces. Grammatically it could also refer to the nearer 'whirlwinds', giving 'the sea choked on the storms and could not swallow them, until they spent themselves at your shores'; but it is the wreckage that the sea fails to swallow and that comes to land. ↩
9. 'Your two shores' (shāṭiʾayki) is a dual, as of a river or strait: the woman is the land on either side where the storm-tossed man finally comes to rest, and the two shores may also suggest her arms receiving him like a harbour. ↩
10. Rakkibīnī means 'assemble me, fit my pieces together', as one builds a ship from its timbers; the same root gives rakiba al-baḥr, 'to take ship, to sail'. So the broken man asks her to rebuild him, and the rebuilt wreckage becomes a vessel that sets sail. ↩
11. Yarfulu describes walking proudly, trailing the hem of a long garment, in ease and luxury. The ship does not merely float in her palms; it moves in them with the leisured swagger of someone at home. ↩
12. The title of the magazine, al-Muʾākhāh, means 'Brotherhood' or 'Fraternity'. ↩