Moudi Sbeity - May You Wake with Goodness

With their poem “May You Wake with Goodness”, Lebanese-American poet Moudi Sbeity extends the kindness of an Arabic blessing. Building radiantly upon the simple “tisbah ‘ala kheir” blessing, Moudi’s poem beautifully expands the invocation to cover all the shadowed corners of a weary sorrowed soul in a war-torn angry world. “May You Wake with Goodness” is a poem from Moudi’s forthcoming collection, Want A World. They told The Dewdrop this collection “addresses not just the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon, but the foundational implications of war and language, and how our orientation towards life shapes and authors these horrific circumstances.” Moudi continued, “My hope is that this collection, and these poems, can speak to that desire in all of us to shape a more possible world fit for everyone.”

May You Wake with Goodness

Here’s a prayer we can sing every night,
a well being wish, a remnant of Arabic sorrow
sprouting from a lineage of longing, a blessing
we can offer the world and each other before
going into that good night.

————tisbah ‘ala kheir – may you wake with goodness.
To mean; upon waking, may all things be good.

May the conditions of life be harmonious, and that
of your heart, at ease. Whatever the day’s troubles
and your unsung labor, whatever the hundreds
of catastrophes and sore aches, tomorrow, may all
manner of things be peaceful. May you awaken
to yourself upon this earth as beneficial. May your
life, overnight and unannounced, stream brilliance
through the canyons of your cracked despair.

But let’s not end here.
When in that iridescent language you say
————may you wake with goodness,
the other replies with a budding tongue
yawning from their stubbed fist of a heart;
————w inta min ahlo –
————————and you of its family.

Moudi Sbeity

Moudi is a first-generation Lebanese-American poet and transpersonal therapist, and the author of the forthcoming books Want A World (Fernwood Press, 2006) and Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press, 2026). In a previous life, Moudi co-owned and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. They call the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado home.