John Asfour

John Asfour Poems

John Asfour Biography

John Asfour (Arabic: جون عصفور‎) (born in 1945 in Aitaneat, Lebanon) (died in 2014 in Montreal, Canada) was a Lebanese-Canadian poet, writer, and teacher. At the age of 13, a grenade exploded in his face injuring his eyes during the Lebanese crisis of 1958. He moved to Canada in 1968. He is a former professor of literature residing in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of 5 volumes of poetry in English, and two in Arabic, he has selected, edited and translated into English the landmark anthology When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry and co-authored with Alison Burch a volume of selected poems by Muhammad al-Maghut entitled Joy is not my Profession. In 2005 and 2007, he organized and held two conferences on Arab Immigrants, their rights and duties for the Ministry of Immigration of Quebec. He resided in Montreal, Quebec.)

The Best Poem Of John Asfour

A Different World

There's no joy
in losing
one of your senses,
it is a falsehood
that other senses will make up for the loss.

One fifth of the world
shifts,
turns into images
and the sight you once had
is replaced by a metaphor.

The vision you scanned the world with
moves
to settle in the recesses
of your memory,
to form permanent scenes
imprinted in your visual field,
etched in sharp clarity
like the pain of love
like nothing
other senses can be
a surrogate for.

Some retains its original value but the rest
fades over the years
or alters
into reconstructed pictures
caused by sound
and touch or
relayed by taste or smell.
Each sense

is responsible
for one definition of your life
and each question others ask
confirms your doubt
something is missing in the equation,
something you will have to do without
demands an explanation of how it feels to lose
something so valuable, so essential

to your life.
How can any of us accept
or, at least, understand
that it is only
the visible world being turned inward
or the world of sight and vision
transposed into ideas and revisions?
How, then, can you get to a point
where the loss is a mere non-sense,
a thing, a momentary frustration
when you try to locate
something you dropped,
something you hear rolling away from you
or when you try to recall your parents' features?

Once the judgment is confirmed,
tasting a plum is a poem,
or touching her skin under the night thunder,
and the smell
of April brings you closer
to being alive.
That is how you discover that the relationship between you and
the universe
is a pure theory
waiting to make itself clear,
only to be abandoned.

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