Arabic Script

What handheld pen so carefully, so preciously described.

Or did you appear, unfolding from where a hand had thrown,

Almost carelessly, your undulating mysteries?

Softest curves and sweet filaments spill out to ensnare;

A hundred traceries enslave my mind.

Did not the gentlest breeze disturb such sweet silhouettes and contours?

Driving before it those gentle curves and forms;

Each delicate shape across the page from right to left,

To seduce beauty from such sleek and sooty marks,

Unfolding as it went; each black and luscious petal;

Each sharp and tiny dagger; each shadow, as on a sun bleached wall

Of tendril and strands caressed each one himself and his companions.

Each stroke; each breath across the page

Unfolding in delicious curved and coiling stem and leaf;

Foliage; tender seed filled grasses;

Thorny barbs with promise of delicious pain.

My unpractised eye is filled with your beauty;

My brain burns to delve within your meaning.

Are you a million truths held and so displayed

Within the elegance of verses of the Qur’an?

Are you a lover’s note written in perfumed words?

The sweetly fragrant words of a lover’s fevered mind?

The apothecary’s recipe for the thousand minor stings

And dagger thrusts of night’s marauding winged hosts?

The remedy for the scorpion’s dark embrace?

Or perhaps a simple list of confections to buy…

Some planned purchases from the bazaar?

Blest, the virgin paper on which you unfold yourself.

O lazy and indolent script; languid silken marks,

Tumbled in lazy ecstasy across the chaste page;

Living lines of delicious thought, a secret to my eye;

Luscious sinuous streams bearing an unknown philosophy.