The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 90. ...arise, dear boy...

Here is a song of sunrise, of joy at dawn, and of love. Thank you for sharing it. 

Very Beautiful Indeed Fine Sir ! 

Beautiful 

A very beautiful homoerotic poem.  Shemu'el ha-Nagid was an interesting human that defied the conventions of the times.  A famous Jewish poet, business man, Vizier of Muslim Granada, and a general of its army.  Nagid was a title he took after 17 years as the head of the Muslim army of Granada.  He was fluent in four languages as well as a Talmudic scholar.

On 3/8/2023 at 8:39 AM, Parker Owens said:

Here is a song of sunrise, of joy at dawn, and of love. Thank you for sharing it. 

Thank you, Parker. A very beautiful set of comments

22 hours ago, JohnnyC said:

Very Beautiful Indeed Fine Sir ! 

Thank you for reading it and sharing your thoughts, John. They are much appreciated

18 hours ago, chris191070 said:

Beautiful 

Thank you, Chris! I'm glad you encountered this poem It's a gem

8 hours ago, raven1 said:

A very beautiful homoerotic poem.  Shemu'el ha-Nagid was an interesting human that defied the conventions of the times.  A famous Jewish poet, business man, Vizier of Muslim Granada, and a general of its army.  Nagid was a title he took after 17 years as the head of the Muslim army of Granada.  He was fluent in four languages as well as a Talmudic scholar.

Thank you, Terry. Via the German press, @Lyssa introduced me to what amounts to the tip of the iceberg concerning same-sex love verse in Muslim Spain. Apparently, mountains of it from medieval times still exist there which have never been translated into Spanish, let alone English. [It's arguable more of it exists in German translation than any other European language.] 

Nagid represents a sub-set of this great flourishing of Gay art, for Jewish poets wrote in Arabic and also turned older Hebrew forms towards expressing the themes popular with Muslim men of lettres, especially where it concerned same-sex love. Almost all of these works are in danger, because the Jewish scholars able to translate them would rather destroy the manuscripts than bring them forward to the living LGBTI2S+ Community today. And what translation has appeared in English in decades past has be altered to render "he" as "she" -- or entire works ignored when massive editing still could not hide the poems' intrinsic Queerness.  

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On a side note, I'd also like to say that Gay poetry survives in Arabic from pre-Muslim times. Such verse has always been treasured as part of that language's "Classics"