This was wonderful, Geoff; thanks. Qabbani reminds me of the romantic poems of Rumi, who held great sway over me all through college.
Funny that you start a thread on poetry this weekend, btw: the subject's come up in my world in a big way recently. A young man I've been gushing about in recent weeks is taking a poetry class, and as a result he and I have been sharing ideas and quotes. I lent him Eliot's Four Quartets and Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. He's already enamored of the former and showed me his notebook where he jotted down several of his favorite lines so far (e.g., "for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at").