The Linguis

Marbella, Spain

In the garden there, trees hung with ripened fruit.
He passed each one by, as though it were a shadow,
a shade, aping by degrees the juicy mores
of fruit, showing the color, air, showing the color
window…  And he spent many lost and losing years
like this, missing the trees for their shadows…

And then, one day, as he was strolling through 
the self-same garden, stepping past each pat truth
that offered itself to his grip, his mouth, his lips,
he began to see the pith of his long-lived mistake,
a smaller man for it, a man of smaller hope.

And at the kernel of what he saw, the rich
tongues he’d forgotten to taste with his own,
a final epiphany: that he was more alone,
having ambled, lash over eye, brow over sense.

And when he turned to be shriven of
the error of his ways, and when he tried to pluck
a newer, different fruit, his palms proved
wetted, stained.  It was, by then, an off-season.

Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic.  Over the last decade and a half, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf, among many others. His first collection and his fourth collection are, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17).  His 5^th collection, But It Was An Important Failure, was published with Cinnamon Press near the start of 2020.  His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in March 2016; and he has published much short fiction, some of it prize-winning.  A study of the oeuvre of Professor Fiona Sampson, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, was published with Anthem Press in 2020, and was released in revised, paperback edition in 2022.  His Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City was published with Fairlight Books in July 2019.  Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, was published with Cinnamon Press in early 2022.  His book of Lebanese verse narratives, The Cedar Never Dies, is published with Northside Press in early 2023; and a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, is to be published with Liquorice Fish in autumn of 2023.  His forthcoming poetry collection, For Echo, will be published with Cinnamon Press in Spring of 2024.  Currently, he teaches at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he is Associate Professor of English.