Moonlight

(In progress - the poetry of the moment shared here is difficult to reproduce)

A Thousand and One Nights must be the most well-known Oriental story in the West. It forged a myth around the Orient, its black hair and wide-eyed beauties; its colourful, sequined and golden treaded garments; its landscapes of desert and oasis, of mosques and crescent moons.

Last night, my twenty-fifth in Beirut, I found myself in the middle of that myth, unexpectedly or perhaps, I had sought it out, subconsciously. After listening to an Egyptian storyteller, a young women with dark curly hair, dressed in black sequins, her eyes glistening with sparkles declaim a tale set in ancient Baghdad but with a lesson for today (Do not speak of something that does not concern you, you may hear something you do not want to), I stepped out into the street to find a perfect crescent moon shining above the Al-Amine mosque. I had always been a little perturbed by the mosque built by Hariri. Although majestic with its blue dome, its four minarets, its sand-coloured stones and its ancient architecture, it stood in the middle of Beirut deceitful. A modern creation, based on storybooks illustrations; neither the restoration of a previous mosque, nor erected where a mosque had formerly stood. Inauthentic, I never truly stopped to contemplate it and only used it has a marker in the city. But last night, under the moonlight I was spellbound. I made abstraction of the cars passing by, of the cranes nearby, of the city lights and transported myself to the heart of the myth of the Orient. It was postcard perfect.

But this sight was not what almost brought tears to my eyes. Lit by the crescent moon, the carcass of the Intercontinental touched me with its silent symbolism and its screaming reminder of the horrors of war. The giant hole on its side, the crescent moon above the city: the scars of Beirut.