Words in the Memory of the Night: Selected Poems

By Mansour Ajami

Death, old age aside,
Nothing is more humbling
than a book or a woman.

A beautiful woman.

With a multicultural aesthetic perspective and a poetic voice that is simultaneously autobiographical and concrete, emotional and surrealistic, universal and humanist, Lebanese-American poet Mansour Ajami introduces his first collection of lyrical expression in Words in the Memory of the Night.

This diverse compilation of more than eighty poems demonstrates diversity and difference of theme, employment of metaphor, idiom, and intellectual and emotional interplay, while exploring philosophical issues as time, space, memory, dreams, youth, old age, love, solitude, and on occasion, such whimsical topics as navels. While writing about everyday experiences like waiting for his children to come home, Ajami presents his poetry with a simple and straightforward style that is easily relatable to others in all stages of life.

In Words in the Memory of the Night, a new poet emerges and shares his culture along with his heart in a memorable collection of modern poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450237376

Mansour Ajami

Mansour Ajami earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from the American University of Beirut and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Author of The Book of Generations: A Reunion with Memory, he currently works as a translator at the United Nations in New York. He lives with his family in Princeton, New Jersey.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

A Sigh for Beirut was published in the Literary Review 37 (3), Spring 1994.

Sumi and Infinity was published in The Space Between our Footsteps, Ed. Naomi Shihab Nye. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Improvisations on a Stringed Instrument was published in A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Ed. D. H. Melhem and Leila Diab. Detroit: the Ridgeway Press, 2000.

For my family

and for those who unwittingly inspired these poems

Contents

Acknowledgments

Improvisations on a Stringed Instrument

A Curious Sunset

An Old Dictionary

Parting with a Book

Words in the Memory of the Night

Sumi and Infinity

Aggressive Is My Memory

You and My Memory

If On a Traveling Dream

Redolent Dreams

Young Dreams

What a Dream!

Your Dreams

Lying in Bed

Love Is No Burden

Teach Me

May I?

For Barbara

A Diaphanous Yawn

Nosy Star

An Eye and a Navel

More Beautiful Than You

Embarrassed Light

Lazy Presence

Flesh upon Flesh

Ready to Read

A Book and a Woman

Food, Women, and Gossip

Would I?

Time, Youth, Absent Death

Time-Future

Can Time Be a Poet?

The Future on My Fingers

Of Time Inhaled

Time and I

Time Tarries

Time

No More Waiting

I Will No Longer Allow

Impossible Space

Winter and Self

Summer Is Arrogant

Silence

Every Land a Voice

Why?

I Need My Worries

Affable Fear

Waiting for My Children

I Am Lonely

Beleaguered

My Body

Loneliness

But …

At Fifty

Pain, Silence, Color

City Streets Are Mine

My Poem, My City

Questions

Court of Legs

Global Village

A Suspicion of Void

My River

Privacy

Mouth Full of Words

Words and Distances

Urban Word

Bemused Poets, Curious Words

Embrace

Syllables

Ask the Poem

Too Shy to Paint

The Magpies

My Mind Is Perched

Mind Waste

Your Eyes and the Night

Your Eyes

Blue Twins

For My Daughter, Louisa-Sanaa’

Happy Syllables

When a Smile Is a Blossom

Smile Away

Sign-Singing

A Hand and a Voice

A Sigh for Beirut

Improvisations on a Stringed Instrument

A strum

A stroke

An oblong sound

the hazy length of

           a healthy yawn

Is it a waterfall

or your hungry fingers

           drawing circles of youth

                      and exhaustion?

I goad my ears

           to swaddle a note

           streak a