The Thing About Being In Love Is That by Omar Sakr

Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr writes a love poem in praise of the endearment 'habibi'.

I pray to god every morning to bury me first
& I simmer to boiling point with melodrama.
I keep it one hundred with sensation, music,

oddities. Yesterday I called even a poem habibi.
I licked the hardwood floors that held a memory
of your feet. I sucked on the bulb of the sun  

outside because it dared to know your hair,
& to prove you out-delicious even the light.
I walked past the rotting hydrangeas in the yard  

and anointed the browning blue habibi 
on the way to see Tolouli, who has owned that word 
for as long as anyone I know—  

do you see how love calls to love? Habibti
do you see how it gathers itself like rain?
It’s not the most intimate dialogue  

hbb is casual you know, a confetti endearment
and maybe this is why it is my favourite
the way it pours and hails out my mouth.  

Inside my earliest memory of habib 
two sweetly huge men kiss hello
ya habibi my uncles or cousins or strangers  

I’m not sure, but I was small and knew
then that anyone could be loved, if
anyone excluded my body. Now I sleep  

and behind my eyelids, a habibi waits.  

At home, the couches, the table, the tea
pot, the bed, the last pregnancy test—all
I am trying to say is that since I met you  

I darling the world.