The poets will definitely meet
probably in a cafe where broke journalists sit
or on a curb where the marginalized smoke their past.
Or maybe on the stage of some cultural center in some country where war brought them to its shore.
Poets will always meet, trust me!
In the vocabulary of used dictionaries.
Stammering on the threshold of poems.
In the gossip alleys that sharpen the tongues of their poet friends
or in an article on literary plagiarism.
Or perhaps they will become neighbors,
like corpses on forgotten books shelves in the bleeding world.
And if none of this ever happens
their eyes will meet on the same line
of a poem that talks about the thread that separates existence
from nowhere.

Shurouk Hammoud is a Syrian poetess, editor and literary translator with a master degree in text translation, Damascus University. She has four published poetry collections in Arabic and two published poetry collection in English; excerpts of her poetry that have been published in many poetry anthologies in France, Poland, Nepal, Serbia, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Mexico and India. She is a member of the Palestinian writers and journalists’ union, the Swedish writers’ union and an honorary member at NAJI Naaman international library of honorary culture.