Poem - A Love That Knows My Name, Poetess - Yasmin Abdul Salam Harmouch (Lebanon)

A Love That Knows My Name

Yasmin Abdul Salam Harmouch

I loved you

before love learned how to speak,

when silence was a homeland

and my heart still believed

that waiting was a form of prayer.

You came

like a quiet certainty,

not loud enough to frighten my past,

not sudden enough to break me,

but true—

so painfully true

that my doubts stepped aside.

With you,

time softened its voice.

Hours no longer chased me,

they sat beside us,

listening to the way our breaths

found each other in the dark.

I learned your name

in the curve of patience,

in the way your hands

never hurried my wounds,

only warmed them

until they remembered how to heal.

Love, with you,

is not a fire that consumes—

it is a light that stays.

A window left open

for my fears to leave

and my courage to return.

When the world grew sharp,

you became my shelter

without asking me to disappear.

You let me be vast,

let me be fragile,

let me be unfinished.

I love you

in the small things—

the pauses between words,

the unasked questions you already know,

the calm that follows your smile

like a promise kept.

If one day

everything else forgets me,

I know your heart will remember.

And that is enough eternity

for one lifetime.

Short Bio

Yasmin Abdul Salam Harmouch is a Lebanese poet and writer whose work explores love, identity, and the quiet strength of human emotion. Her writing has been featured in various literary platforms and translated into several languages. She believes poetry is a bridge between vulnerability and truth, and a home for the unspoken.