“To part at last without kiss,
Beside the haystack in the floods.”
-William Morris.
I cannot give you reasons enough,
I do not myself understand
The loud lover, praying in sin,
Or the pain of those who sin in prayer.
A good-bye hurts a hundred times more,
Emptying the soul, embittering the heart,
Much more than a fatal spear-wound would.
The happy love is flown, a by-gone glow;
Locked in memory’s gloomy corridors;
A mere past, life imprisoned in grief;
Robbed of fulfillment, future condemned to tears,
Gazing sadly over the prey of previous existence.
A good-bye hurts.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, the poet was raised in a politically prominent family; yet in his early teens, the poet and his family emigrated to the United States, where the poet lived for nearly two decades. Kassim started writing and publishing poetry while in junior college, at a relatively young age, and almost spontaneously fell with poets and poems, and has so been ever since; particularly the Romantic poets–William Wordsworth, George Gordon, Lord Byron, John Keats and Percy Shelley–drew his attention and engaged hìs intellect, so much so that, to this day, they represent more or less ‘the epitome’ of whatPoesymeans to him.The poet now lives in his land of birth and works as a freelance journalist and writer. Kassim is currently preparing manuscript of what he hopes to be his first book of poetry; the poet feels a particular attachment to John Keats and Percy Shelley for their vehement opposition to the inhumane effects on ordinary people such as the consequences of industrial development in their lifetimes–and reminds us that technological progress today does the same: ‘Weep, for the world is wrong!’ (emphasis supplied) (Percy Shelley, “Dirge”)