Leila Eid is a Lebanese poet and writer living in Beirut.  Known for her intimate poetic voice, she has published two collections of poetry and numerous poems on Facebook, and is considered one of the most important poets in contemporary Lebanon.

A long shadow

I wasn't quite a body.
I was a walking talisman.
And wishes that stumbled at lovers' doors.
All the people I've loved
Are gone like a tryst in a dream
Leaving only a long shadow,
Its sigh dragging on an extinguished tongue.

The departure is not without a breath.
A flash in the eyes
A dry tear
My mother's voice as I traveled
I store my ashes in a pot of basil
And wait
Maybe a bird will grow from my mouth.

Caught in a haze of light
I call to the one I love with a silence that awakens memory.
I hide my face in the pocket of night
Like dawn when it grows old.
Don't ask me my name
I forgot it at the last farewell
I pass among you like air.
I'm gone like the last star
And the songs of Fayouz

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Point of light

I was born of an old silence
Incomplete poetry
A point of light in search of a possible
I hold a fallen star.
Where do planets go when lovers are absent.

My shadow is souls I haven't lived
They precede me into the past
Or the future
My life is a mere thought
My death is a door
And in the door is a secret
Nearby, the answer sleeps.

My language is ashamed of love
I borrow silence
From the long embrace
I gather time like grains of sand
I let it slip away
As you did.

Everything is fleeting except my purity
Everything is ephemeral except my trembling.
Your hands are like a beam
And your face a memory
When I spoke
The voice was not deliverance
Nor words the salvation...

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Lost between two deaths

I walk through time as if I did not belong
Neither to lazy seasons
Nor faded cities.
I walk toward distant signs
My steps make time germinate
Give my shadow embroidered stories or mirages
The possibilities of tomorrow or yesterday
A child who forgot the password
You, who pass through the fire of grief
Does absence go where it begins?
Clouds are water that return the question to its origin
If I tried to run away from you
You'd find yourself waiting for me there.
The departure is a birth
Lost between two deaths
Let's leave our names
Two stars asleep in the first darkness.
The truth is closer than the dream.
No name in this dimension.

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Guardians of memory

Remember me.
As if you catch my breath from the clouds
when the wind calls you from a glance of light
If you pass through nostalgia
And sorrow brushes your brow.

A deluge of names is not enough, neither is the tear
Send their voices like dark stars.
Unsung melodies.
Like the break of a ray in the eyes of the horizon.

I am the one who passed like a cloud without rain,
But who carried water in all her pain.
The one who inhabited stories
As neither the heroine
Nor the narrator.
Memory doesn't bring me back.
It gives form to absence.
It gives radiance to the faces of those to whom we didn't say goodbye

Remember me as a whisper,
Hesitated for a moment
And dared not speak.
My broken homeland is my shadow.
And no other port but the illusion of waiting.
Oblivion has walked above and below me.
I die at my zenith...

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God's sigh

Precipice of secrecy... and breath.
No form touches me.
No horizon bounds
The planets' intuition when it strays.
And God's sigh when he created love and poets.

The air writes poems.
Forgotten in the clouds...
Stars close their eyes.
Fearful of a sky bare of dreams.
The sea doesn't sink ships.
They are returned to the tales
Forgotten by the waves.

I miss the light in the absence of corners.
I bow to the wandering shadows.
To the waves of the ether.
And the blue ray
When did we meet?
There is no time in beginnings.

I stealthily open the door to the galaxy
As gentle passers by are wont.
I unfurl erect crosses.
The hymns of those who have gone
And those who have come
I follow their extended distraction
With open hands
In the vastness of patience.

I redraw the lost celestial bodies.
The universe has not yet completed its verses.
We find ourselves in the absolute void
Like a wind unsullied by the cries of war.
A homeland without dimension
Rowing my soul
Towards an unknown place.
Remember me
Every time a ghost passes
Resembling no one.
As if I hadn't existed
As if I were still here.

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Beirut

Beirut won't stop my path
When I awaken the volcano.

My right hand, nine times severed
I hold out to bait the mouth of silence
Until the tongue of fire is hungry
I grab it like a whip to flog the trunk of my poem.

I kiss you with my left hand
Until you live.
And my mouth, which imagined snow,
Will regain its colour
Like poppies...