Without a Kiss is my new poetry chapbook recently released by Finishing Line Press. Very loosely, the poems tell the story of young love and the longed for kiss that was never to be shared. I am an Egyptian Canadian immigrant. My family and I moved to Canada when I was in my early teens. The move from a traditional and very conservative Egyptian environment to the unaccustomed freedom of the West had a marked impact on my life. The conflicts and difficulties encountered in learning to relate to this new world, particularly in the realm of human relationships, became the driving force behind many of my poems. Two poems:
Buried Where I grew up girls waited, were taught, expected to wait, queens, Nefertitis awaiting excavation.
So I waited until you came and resurrected me, but only briefly, as if to say, “This is the life you can have. Now go get it.”
But what you’re taught from birth is not so easily discarded. I kept on waiting. This time I knew it was for you.
You are a grandfather now, and I’m no longer waiting.
But you remain in the casket within, and there it still feels like waiting. There you are always seventeen, King Tut. Isn’t that also how you still feel inside? No receding hairline and wrinkle free, distant as the year we met but
clear as the butterfly close to my hand, the child’s boat upon a wave, the evening star, still beckoning, always out of reach,
just as you were when you sat across from me, and your eyes said we were one,
on a train to different destinations.
Approaching the terminal now, I wonder, will future generations unearth your golden casket when they come digging for the silent past in me?
Past midnight on a deserted train in Venice waiting for dawn and the train to move us toward our destination, you sat across from me, but only for a minute, then asked to rest your head on my lap, moved over, and in the dark I must have seemed almost beautiful to you.
Reaching up, you removed my glasses and seeing me naked then for the first time, praised the arch of my brows.
Who knows what else you were thinking or hoped to undress when you inquired if I was cold, took the hand I held against my chest, the other being under your head but with my cape between.
The appropriate second or two and I withdrew my hand, as you loosened your grip, reluctantly?
Too late to undo the move, I saw my own desire in your pretext, cursed myself then and a thousand times since, knowing how different our journey might have been, had I just let my hand linger.