Image courtesy of the poet
Where the rose is not worshipped
the night tortures,
that’s what lead us to praise music,
there are better gods in the chords
in the melody that takes a roar
and turns into a rose again,
now there are ten moons in this room,
a thousand miles in this corridor
but not a single whisper inside us.
~ Nathalie Handal
Click here to read Nathalie Handal’s photo essay on visiting Kabul
Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world, educated in the United States and United Kingdom, and has moved between cities in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the United States most of her life. Her recent books include the flash collection ‘The Republics’, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers†and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed ‘Poet in AndalucÃa’; and ‘Love and Strange Horses’, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.
