My worlds collided when I heard “The Astounding Eyes of Rita,” released earlier this month on the ECM label. Serendipity, kismet, epiphany — it all sounds so melodramatic. But this CD carries the timeless weight of human desires, the beauty of human artistry and the despair of human conflict.

To call the experience of listening to this CD melodramatic is trite. If you don’t re-examine the meaning of existence while listening to this latest creation of Anouar Brahem, then it’s worth trying again.

Until this year I had never heard of Brahem, a Tunisian musician and composer who blends traditional Arab music with contemporary Western jazz. He turned 52 last week. Brahem trained on the ancient stringed instrument oud. He later ventured to Paris where he transformed his music from folk accompaniment to solo instrumental compositions.

I had never heard of Palestinian poet and former PLO activist Mahmoud Darwish, who died last year in Texas after heart surgery complications. Darwish resigned from the PLO in objection over the Oslo Agreement and publicly criticized internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah as suicide. He was considered by Palestinians as their national voice of exile.

I had never read Darwish’s poem, “Rita and the Rifle,” that tells of his passion for an Israeli woman while he was imprisoned. The affair could not continue because a rifle stood between their fight for a permanent home and peace. Apparently the rest of the world knows the poem, as it has been put to music and film many times over.

Darwish’s life and poetry obviously inspired Brahem’s “The Astounding Eyes of Rita,” which includes a reprinting of “Rita and the Rifle.” While the music is hauntingly beautiful with its Middle Eastern melodies in minor keys and rhythmically amazing with its North African and Mediterranean syncopations, the music exists in the context of competing desires for a home and transcends the conflict into a harmonious appreciation for life.

This CD arrived by mail while I had the day off from teaching part-time in Portland. Several of my students have recently arrived as refugees from Iraq, via Jordan and Kuwait. While I teach them English and math, they are teaching me Arabic. Most, but not all, of my students are Moslem. Their eyes are beautiful and eager with darting and sometimes foggy attention. They do not care that I am female and Christian. They do not care that their computer teacher is Jewish.

On this day off, I was in the middle of reading a tattered copy of Leon Uris’s, “Exodus,” which I had randomly picked from a bookshelf a year ago, about the time this CD was actually recorded. Brahem’s CD includes songs titled “The Lover of Beirut,” “Al Birwa,” “Galilee Mon Amour” and “Walking State.” The songs were like chapters from the book but told from the opposite perspective.

I played the CD, stopped reading and went from the autumn peacefulness of mundane Minot, Maine, to an ancient world that I can never understand. Images and lines from my favorite poem, “Kubla Khan,” by Samuel Coleridge, mingled with Brahem’s distinct oud, accompanied by his lilting vocal, a bass clarinet and percussion. Coleridge’s poem tells of a damsel with a dulcimer and her demon lover who had drunk the milk of Paradise.

And I read Darwish’s poem that yearned for “once upon a time” and “honey-colored eyes” and the rifle that stood between them and a lost Paradise.

I saw that Brahem’s music was dedicated to Darwish, who was born in 1941, the same year the elite Jewish fighting group Palmach came to being with occupying British help and promise and later British betrayal. Darwish was born in Al Birwa, which was destroyed in the Arab-Israeli war, and fled to Lebanon as a Palestinian refugee. He spent most of his adult life exiled from Israel, but later lived in the West Bank.

Brahem’s musical composition and technique are beautiful on their own merit. But true artistry, whether in music or poetry or dance or paint, makes the ordinary person feel extraordinarily alive. I want to hear more of Brahem’s music. If only those who inspire it could love life as much as his music embodies it.

Emily Tuttle spent several years traveling and writing as a daily news reporter in California and Arizona. Music is one of her passions. She lives in Minot and works as a free-lance writer and ESL teacher.