Sameen Borker

“Nothing Here is Enough”

I need a parrot,
identical days,
a quantity of needles,
and artificial ink
to make history.

I need veiled eyelids,
black lines,
and ruined puppets
to make geography.

I need a sky wider than longing,
and water that is not H2O
to make wings.

The days are no longer enough
to distinguish the missing.
I no longer see you
because I no longer dream.
I offer a tear to the rain
as if scattering you
in the Dead Sea,
and in order to sing you,
I need glass to muffle the sound.”
― Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard

“It has not the arrogance of wine, the self- consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“love is an attitude toward reality – usually of someone finite toward something infinite.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays