Tea and Sleep

Taha Muhammad Ali, who died in 2011, was an exceptional person and an extraordinary poet, with an expansive imagination. Several years before he died, he had already conjured a poem about his final hours as he’d like them be. He read the poem in front of a live audience in Port Townsend, Washington, in 2006, and here we offer a lively recording of the poem, read first in Arabic by Taha and then in English by his translator Peter Cole.