Zabanam Ra Namefahmi

Zabanam Ra Namefahmi — You Do Not Understand My Language — is a poem about the failure of legibility between two people who are in the same space. The speaker's language is ununderstood, the glance unseen, the tears unobserved, the sighs unregistered — not because the beloved is absent but because she simply does not perceive what is being communicated. This is a more painful scenario than absence: the beloved is there, but the speaker's signals pass through her without response.

'Words lie sleeping in my eyes — my glance has a hundred languages' is the poem's central image. The eyes as the place where unexpressed words sleep is an unusual formulation — not words that cannot be said but words that have not yet woken, that exist in potential rather than expression. And despite these sleeping words, the glance itself speaks a hundred languages. The speaker is communicating in every available nonverbal channel simultaneously, and still nothing is received.

'O dark-lashed one — look once at my white hair / O white-limbed one — you do not see my dark days' — the contrast of white hair against dark days, dark lashes against white skin, is structurally deliberate. White hair signals age and time spent; dark days signal suffering and duration. The beloved's physical appearance (dark lashes, white skin) is young and beautiful; the speaker's physical condition (white hair) and emotional condition (dark days) represent what that time and suffering have cost. The beloved's beauty is unmarked by what the speaker has endured. 'You do not see my dark days' is both a literal observation and a summary of the poem's subject: two people present to each other, one invisible to the other.