Another example of this revelatory approach to meaning is the following poem by Bassam Hajjar titled ‘Wall:’

 Wall		
A person	
of stone and plaster,
exposed by moisture
and cracks
like one speaking in his sleep.

Much more is achieved here than an anthropomorphising of the wall. The juxtaposition of wall and person on one hand and exposure through moisture or involuntary speech on the other makes this poem. The poem defines the wall against or rather through its very opposite in our minds which is exposure(fadh). By the end of the poem we are left thinking not about the wall but about the ‘person’ and the cracks and exposures that define him or her.

The following free-standing section from a longer poem by the Syrian Kurdish poet Salim Barakat is a compact world closed unto itself.

This a horizon,
that a horizon, 
and together they are 
the crotch of the wind.
	أفق هذا
	:أفق ذاك
.كلاهما عانة الريح 
 

The short length, in this case, has meaning or consequences. It allows the piece to exist almost from beginning to end on the cusp of silence. The shorter the composition the more intense we assume it to be and the more depth we take it to have. Aware of it as part of a larger context, we are also inclined to read it inwardly, searching in it for meaning that is purely a product of its coagulation or crystallisation. Thinking of the network of connections we are used to identifying in a longer poem, we expect to find a similarly complex network in the restricted space of the short composition. Barakat here allows us to witness the assembling of a shocking image out of unsuspected parts.

The question ‘Can there be an Arabic prose poem?’ is a specific instantiation of the more universal ‘Can there be a prose poem?’ However, in the case of Arabic, the question takes on a specific character and added urgency because it threatens to transform the long-standing definition of Arabic poetry in a way that none of the other poetic forms have previously done, no matter how radical they were thought to be when first introduced.

The prose poem is the site where the poetic is interrogated and the definition of Arabic poetry which thus far had been tied to form, and especially meter, is revised. If formal prescriptions are abandoned, what is it that makes a text a poem? Are there linguistic or sonic or even thematic qualities that make a prose piece a poem? Can any text, if viewed in a particular way, be called poetry? The prose poem as a critical lens invites us, tempts us even, to revisit the long tradition of Arabic prose looking for precedents of poetry-making outside meter and pre-conceived forms.

If earlier iterations of the Arabic poem remain within the purview delineated for poetry in Arabic by a rearrangement but not an abandonment of meter, the prose poem is the first poetic form to jump the fence of meter and make the claim of poetry, and more problematically of poem-building, in unchartered territory. It has established itself as a perpetuation of an ‘other’ tradition, alternate and dissenting in its relationship to the established poetic aesthetic, and became a subversive space in which literary, critical, ideological, and social institutions are challenged.