Antony Johae

Antony Johae

Antony Johae (b. 1937 Chiswick, Middlesex) has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature – a study of Dostoevsky and Kafka. He has taught at the University of Essex and in Germany, Ghana, Tunisia and Kuwait. He retired in 2009 and now divides his time between Colchester and Lebanon (his wife’s country of origin).

Antony is a member of Mosaic, the Colchester Stanza of the Poetry Society, as well as the Suffolk Poetry Society. In 2015, he came out with Poems of the East (Gipping Press) and in 2019 After-Images: Homage to Éric Rohmer (Poetry Salzburg). The High Window Press published Ex-Changes: Early Poetry and Prose in 2020, and he is hopeful that Mica Press at Wivenhoe will take on his Home Poems for 2022, when he will also be working on completing Lines on Lebanon.

Arrival at Rafik Hariri International Airport

The queue wasn’t long for foreigners;
the other for Lebanese, guest workers
home for a few days from the Gulf,
stretched back a bit. I stood on the yellow line.

He stamped the man before me
and beckoned. “Bonjour,” I said and he smiled.
I handed him my passport, he flipped through the pages.
“You are coming from Kuwait?” and I nodded.

“What is your occupation?” “I teach at the University –
English . . . English Literature.”
He looked at me and then at my picture,
again at me and said:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Copyright © Antony Johae 2019


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