Hearts, Tears & the Journey of Life: Loving, Lamenting and Meditation, Middle Eastern Style

By Tarif Youssef-Agha

This book takes you closer than ever to the Middle Eastern views of love, death, and life all through the eyes of a Syrian poet who lived his youth in the ancient capital city of Damascus. In the first section, he is exchanging words of love with pretty women who invaded his heart—giving joys or causing wounds. In the next one, he is shedding tears for beloved ones who were kidnapped by death, leaving deep, painful scars behind. And in the last one, he is trying to make sense of the endless mysteries of life, which will continue to be a puzzle forever.

Visit his bilingual website at http://sites.google.com/site/tarifspoetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984552020

Tarif Youssef-Agha

Tarif was born in Damascus, Syria in 1957. He started writing short stories and articles in his early years of elementary school and free style poetry in his college years.He earned 2 BS degrees in Engineering and Literature from Damascus University.After a number of encounters with the brutal Syrian dictatorship regime, he decided that Syria was not a safe country to live in. He moved to the U.S. in the Eighties and restarted his life from scratch.He organized several poetry recital events in Houston in the years 2009 and 2010, glorifying the civilization, history and culture of his nation. As soon as the Arab Spring revolutions started late 2010, he instantly moved to their side one after one and step by step with his writings; he published 3 books in poetry and one book in short stories documenting them.In 2018, he published his 5th book ‘Hearts, Tears and the Journey of Life’ that contains collective poems of Love, Lamenting and Meditation.Seeing how the young generation was being attacked by a new kind of enemy, he took it upon himself to write this book. He is blowing the whistle on cell-phone addiction to draw attention to the underestimated danger it is going to create. On the other hand, he is opening doors for solutions. To him, giving up should NOT be an option.

Book preview

Hearts, Tears & the

Journey of Life

Loving, Lamenting and Meditation,

Middle Eastern Style

Tarif Youssef-Agha

Copyright © 2018 by Tarif Youssef-Agha.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018910626

ISBN:                  Hardcover                  978-1-9845-5190-0

                             Softcover                    978-1-9845-5189-4

                             eBook                          978-1-9845-5202-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/14/2018

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Contents

Dedication

The Editor’s Note

The Author’s Introduction

HEARTS

Damascus, a Beauty with an Arabic Identity

Love Lessons

Playing Music by the Heart

Forgive Me

Your Love Bores Me

Oh my Heart, it is Enough!

Don’t Blame me for Surrendering to Love

They Asked Him, Is She Practicing Magic on You?

They Said, Explain Love to Us

Where Did You Get that Beauty?

I Made My Heart a Lighthouse

On the Wedding Day

I Once Heard that Love is Betraying

She Told Him, Oh My Lord

The People in Love were Gone

She Asked me if I was still in Love with her

TEARS

In Lamenting Nanna

Farewell to the Teacher

In Lamenting a Friend’s Mother

In Lamenting Hayat

In Lamenting Sumaya

Remembering Letha

In Lamenting Abu Fayez

In Lamenting Abu Ubaida

Let’s Remember Naeem Al Yafi

Farewell to a Brave Man

In Lamenting My Dad

Forty Days after my Dad

In the Funeral of a Friend’s Mother

In Lamenting a Beloved

A Year Passed since my Dad has Left

In Lamenting a Friend’s Wife

A Poem to a Wounded Poet

Another Beloved One has Gone

Two Years since my Dad has Left

In Lamenting Rasha

Three Years since my Dad has Left

A Friend’s Dad Passed Away Today

Oh my Aunt, I don’t Know to whom I Should Sue Time

THE JOURNEY OF LIFE

A New Year

Between Youth and Gray Hair

Houston is a Big City

The Years of our Lives

I lived the Life

A Waiting Station Is Life

My Days Are Passing as a Herd of Sheep

And Life is No More than a Prison

They Asked me, do you Know any Cure?

They Asked me about Life

You, Who Live this Life

They Asked me what March Means to You?

They Said Tell us about the Days

Those who Know Life

I Say to those who Ask about me

I met a lot of People

Classy Talk

Oh My Birthday

The Author at a Glance

THE ARABIC MATERIALS

Dedication

I dedicate these poems to those who believe that love is the color of life and to those who believe that life is just a journey, but also to the souls of the beloved ones who left us forever.

The Author

Houston, Texas

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The Editor’s Note

The poet Tarif is a man of the people. He is also a Syrian revolutionary. This collection of poems is a departure from his usual poems about the Syrian War. These are poems that reflect the man’s passion and soul in their most basic human expression. Here is his treatise on Love and seduction, and the games and risks young lovers take. Here he delves into the heartache of loss of beloved friends or family, his lamentation poems about his father are intense and deeply touching. And he speaks to the human need for meditation and musings about the meaning of life and the mystery of death.

He is not interested in high art or in satisfying the criteria for sophisticated poetry. His intent is simple and adamant: he wants to reach and be easily understood by the common person. He is most elated when his poetry touches the imagination and the understanding of a boy or girl, or of the baker, the mechanic, the housewife, or the shop girl. This collection does just that.

The poems of love, the poems of lamentation, the poems of universal truths, all of these poems convey to the reader sincere thoughts and raw emotion. My task was to assist the poet in converting his translations to the rhythm and rhyme American English. In such a process, one becomes engaged with the essence of each poem and its force in delivering its message.

In translation, a poet runs the risk of losing impact, but if he is lucky, he will stumble upon close correlations in phraseology and phrases of similar cultural impact as in the soul of the original language. Tarif’s poems take that risk and his everyman’s approach to the poetry facilitates understanding even in translation. Who doesn’t understand the language of love?

This poet’s original Arabic versions of his work may contain nuance and cultural references embedded throughout. Such things add richness to his work that perhaps becomes less rich in translation. But given the added element of using rhyme the old-fashioned way raises the bar even higher. What may be a natural impulse toward rhyme that delivers universal truths in Arabic, places additional demands on that rhyme in English. Nonetheless, Tarif’s poems take us to very tender places when we least expect it.

These poems take on an almost epic style and dimension when read in their couplets and rhyme. A subject that might have started out as a basic I miss you somehow finds elevation in the details and rhythm that are the style of this poet of the people. Read these poems slowly and fast, but don’t neglect to savor the tenderness beneath each line.

J.C. Salazar

Retired English professor

HCC, Central Campus. Houston, TX.

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The Author’s Introduction

In my first book A Journey around the Arab-Spring Revolutions, which was published in December 2014, I supported the struggle of the Arab people in five countries against their dictators, honoring their quest for Freedom, Dignity and Democracy. In my second book The Chronicles of the Syrian Revolution, which was published in July 2017, I documented the first six