The Last Poem/ القصيدة الأخيرة

by Hiba El Miari and Roula Karawi

عمل مشترك بين هبة الميعاري ورُلى كراوي

Project Summary: a series of illustrations depicting 10 verses from a collections of poems and letters written by the author when she was 16 years old describing the rise and fall of her love. Verses were originally written in Arabic and they are translated to English by Hiba.

While I was going over my old notebooks, I stumbled across old love letters and poems that I had written at the age of 16. They brought a smile to my face, the same smile you have when a kid shows you a drawing of theirs. The maturity and selectiveness of your taste tells you that the color scheme is inharmonious and the coloring outside the lines is bothersome to look at. Yet, you adore the drawing with all its obsessively distracting imperfections and hang it on the fridge to celebrate your child’s passion and creativity. Similarly, I could not but cringe at my choice of words in these poems, the poor structure of my sentences and the outburst of dramatic descriptions. Yet, the intensity of the emotions moved me and softened my heart.

Digital illustration of the poem cover. The illustration is a love letter with the title of the work on the top.

The verses are illustrated beautifully by KW artist Roula Karawi who brought my idea to execution in the most creative way possible.

The love in those letters was so profound that it made me want to immortalize this state of affection as a reminder of how much I am capable of loving. Those feelings were raw, dramatic, and unfiltered which forgave the amateur nature of the poems and the poor writing skills. I thought about editing and proofreading these poems but I realized that doing so will definitely ruin their authenticity which is what makes them so unique. So, I decided to re-purpose them. Out of 13 poems and two love letters that covered different stages of my emotions, I chose my favorite verses, which added up to 10, to be depicted in a series of illustrations. Those verses make up The Last Poem, thus the title of the project, inspired by my then love interest and it describes the course of the relation with its different stages.

If every poet got rid of their poems when a relationship ended, we would have never known what love is. And if every artist gave up just because they started rough, we would not have known art. I am not a poet nor an artist by all means, but I am glad I kept everything. This is a celebration of imperfection, mediocrity and incompetence. More importantly, it is a send-off to any remnants of the past, mediocrity and incompetence.

Now, I hope at the age of twenty three my mom is incapable of punishing or grounding me for having a relationship at the age of sixteen.

Like in Babylon

Ever since I started loving you, I feel like the hanging gardens of Babylon: suspended between heaven and earth.

كما في بابل

منذ أن خفق قلبي لك وأنا أتأرجح كحدائق بابل بين السماء والأرض