When I first read "Meeting at an Airport" by Taha Muhammad Ali. I thought that it was about to ex-lovers that found each other again. I was pretty confused about why the girl would cry if she saw her ex at the airport because most girls would completely ignore him. But maybe that's just immature, high school girls but still most people wouldn't be extremely happy about seeing their ex again. So then I got to thinking about maybe the couple was split apart forcefully and that is why they are so happy to see each other. It was also apparent that they hadn't seen each other for a really long time because of this quote from the poem, "…A question/now four decades old:/I salute that question's answer;/an an answer/as old as your departure" (Ali 20-25). So it has been at least forty years since they have last met so that quite a while. But the theory of them being spilt apart seemed to fall apart because it says that she departed. The defination of departure is "the action of leaving" so by that quote and that word it would seem that she willing left him which leaves a lot of questions to be answered.
Once I did research into the poet's past did I finally find out what the poem was really about. Ali was born in a village near Galilee in the Israeli region. The Israelis attacked and completely destroyed his village so him, his family and his bride-to-be Amira went to Lebanon. A while later Ali and his family returned to Israel but Amira got stuck in Lebanon. So with no hope of ever seeing her again Ali married another women and started a family. A long while later the poet decided to see if he could find Amira again so with help from a friend he located Amira. They met up at an airport and the poem is about when they met again forty years after they were split apart. That was pretty awesome that the whole poem was based on a real life event so that definitely made analyzing it a lot easier. Yet in some ways harder because it's pretty black and white to what the poem is about so it's harder to think creatively or deeply about the metaphorically meaning. My thoughts about the poem changed a lot over the course of the project because at first I thought that it was a stupid lovey dovey poem about how your true love will always find you again. But as I found out it was about love, peace, war, violence, hatred, loss and finding.
