poems of transgressive poetics, along with recollections from the registers of
socio-political suffering. As an intertext for so many cross-boundaries and
currents, the poem is no less a process than a “wound,” alert and alive,
reminding its readers of the poet’s identification of poetry and Sufism as
“the wound won’t be healed, and the seed won’t die,” as al-Baymtlsays in “The
Sufferings of al->allmj.”^70
The second section of al-Baymtl’s “Elegy to Khalll Hmwl” refers to the
suicide of the poet in 1982 in anger, it was reported, at the Israeli siege of
Beirut. Written in the past tense, it could specifically mean Khalll >mwl, but
it could also include others, for al-Baymtlwas in the habit of emphasizing the
immortality of poetry, for which poets die to intensify its potential for
endurance. Both poetry as creativity and love as rebirth join forces in the
matrix of al-Baymtl’s poetry to minimize physical death. If death occurs, it is
only to indict an unjust and love-cruel universe:
Creativity is love
Love is death
Creativity/love/death: a birth
Why did Neruda and Hikmat die then?
Why is the last rose
In the window of my house burned?^71Set within this context, the second section of the elegy is open-ended and
ambiguous. It resists specific referentiality on purpose:
As the poet departed
His footsteps drew the map of things.
(“Elegy to Khalil Hawi,” 269)A direct reference to >mwl’s suicide occurs in the third section, for avowedly
there is a challenge, as the poem takes shape, transgressive and revolutionary
to the last:
When the poet killed himself
His great journey began
His visions burned in the sea.
When his cry penetrated the kingdom of exile
The people coming from the desert of love began
To smash the gods of clay
And build the kingdom of God.
(Ibid. 268–69)By displacement of positions and discursive slippage, “visions” and the
poet’s “cry” or poem take over, relegating the personal suicide to the
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS