All That We Have Poem by Khalid Albudoor

Because there is no one there
Now is the time
For me
To set off
On the road
Toward the desert.

There
I would be
Where no one covers the horizon
Or prevents the sky from falling
On my head.

When the winter comes
Or the summer nears
With its burning winds
I would be the wonderer
Who's searching
For you.

The night
Binds me like a page in a book
And when the morning surprises me
With its sun,
The red apple,
I would stand
Like old monastery's column
Uttering melodies
Of traveling Bedouins,
Praying for the darkness
With all my heart's beats
So my voice can
Reach you.

It will not be too late
In the age
To come back to you
Because your voice always comes back
And burns my life
With your hot breaths.

I see an image of your body
Laying in the dark
Burning
And I ask
How can we learn love
When night is dry
Like an old tree
And all the horizons
Are not welcoming
For the journey.

I extend my hand
But cannot touch you
I know
We are two souls
In solitude
I know that daydreams
All that we have
When our hearts search
For a shelter.

I approach wells in the summer
I find that
You are the water,
And in winter nights
You are burning with enigmatic light
Your lightning breaks the sky,
For that
My dream's desert
Is bright.

Because no one is there
We will lay down
On the shoulder of a dune
Gazing silently
At colors of far hills
We wait for no one
You might say
No more Bedouins
They disappeared
All of them
Before we knew them
Or wrote their names
On the skins of our tent
Before we learned love from them
And I would say
Look carefully
Behind our dune
I can see their souls approach us
Rising from the mirage of distance
Or
Appearing to us from
The future.

I extend my hand
Toward you
Carrying a few daydreams
This
Is all that remains for us.
And we have few more years
To build our tent
Near the wells,
We will stay all night
With the light of
Our existence
While we wait for the Bedouins
Stop their journeys
To settle into the sand
We will hand them buckets
Filed with water
And they, from their time worn bags,
Will hand us
Love
So we can learn it
Again.