Walid Daou, a poet and schoolteacher born in 1981 in Mount Lebanon, has published a poem in tribute to Bassam Saba, the founder of the New York Arabic Orchestra who led Lebanon's National Higher Conservatory of Music from 2018 until his death from complications of Covid-19 in 2020. The poem originally appeared in the 2021 SONG issue of ArabLit Quarterly. In the work, Daou uses the metaphor of salt—a reference to the Gospel of Matthew, where Christ calls his disciples the salt of the earth—to explore loss and perseverance.
Daou wrote that he would walk from his home to Mar Yousef Church in Beirut's Monot district, where the Conservatory held recitals each Friday evening. He described the walk as creating a paradox: it shed accumulated fatigue but also imposed new fatigue. At the church, Saba would greet him with a smile that Daou said sufficed as his own form of encouragement.
The name Bassam means "ever smiles" in Arabic, deriving from the same linguistic root as Basim, meaning "smiling." The poem also alludes to Bassem Chit, a revolutionary socialist organizer and close friend of Daou who died of a heart attack at age 34 in 2014.