Happiness is not a fleeting laugh,
nor a gown of light draped over time’s shoulders
Happiness, my love, is your hand holding mine —
as if you're holding the world,
as if I am the only truth in this night.
I do not laugh because I am happy;
I laugh because your eyes taught mine
how to bloom smiles from deep within—
from the same place where pain once carved its silence.
The love between us is not an event—
it is a climate.
In it, words bud like spring,
and meanings tremble with shy delight.
When your palm touches mine,
a language is born between our fingers—
a language unknown to dictionaries,
yet it dwells in my heart as a bird dwells
in the shadow of a tree.
We laugh at nothing—
at a shared sip of coffee,
at a typo in a message,
at a whisper that sounds like a song
the world forgot to write about us. We laugh,
for we lived too long outside this joy.
But when we found one another,
we began to write happiness across our faces
like rain writing its name on the windowpane.
O you who taught me
that time is something to be lived— that night is not just for sleep,
but for embraces,
for late-night talks, and for dreaming of a small house where light stretches from your gaze to my chest.
And so I tell you:
If happiness is a heaven,
then you are its open gate.
And if love is a river,
your smile is its shore,
your voice its current,
your hand the moonlight spilled upon its waters.
O joy that breathes from between your lips—
Stay, so I may stay.
□
Whispers of Water
To you, O woman of dew and sap of life…
When the waters whisper songs of love,
I think of you
As if every drop knows your name,
calling it with a tenderness
only your voice could teach.
Light hangs gently
from the shoulder of a cloud whenever you remember me,
and mountains bow to listen—
just as I bow whenever your voice touches any corner of this heart.
The voices of waterfalls are your reflection in nature—
bending, bold, pure, healing—
asking for nothing but to be loved.
Beloved, have you ever placed
your hand upon the chest of a river?
You’d hear me then—
loving you in every pulse,
longing for you in every splash, chanting your name
with each flowing thread of water.
I do not write poetry—
I write you.
You are the language no one invented,
and the poem that wrote me
before I ever wrote it.
Every waterfall echoes your laughter
Every drop holds your image
Every trembling ripple pulls me back to you again and again. The path to you
is like reaching an endless spring—
I walk it with a longing no time can measure,
moistened only by my eyes whenever I miss you.
O lovelier than the whispers of water—
to you I give all that words cannot hold,
and all this heart whispers
when the universe is silent,
and you sing to me—
without a sound.
□
- Kareem Abdallah
Iraq
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