16 and a half years ago, the gentle poet and elegant journalist Abdullah Bahitham turned his last page, opening the doors of sweetness to the memory flowing from the folds of his lavish entertaining biography, and the windows of memories knocking on my “oxophone” sticks, a lush grief that takes the corner of dreamers to it.
A luxurious biography that was not surrounded by a halo that it deserved, but it remained stuck on the walls of Saudi culture. And his madness as a critical journalist is not good at retreating to his traditions and does not recognize monotony. Over the past three decades, he was lit with a delicious riot that prompted his comrades to classify him as a rioter, a tramp, and a rebel in his creativity and revelation.
Bahitham volunteered his deepening in journalistic work to serve creative projects, and he was born great in the time of giants, among whom he was a match for them.
He made his professional path by working as an English language teacher in 1399 AH. In the late seventies, he worked as an editor for cultural affairs in Al-Nadwa newspaper (now Makkah), then in the cultural section of Iqraa magazine in 1985. He headed the cultural section of Al-Bilad newspaper in several periods and died after that was his last stop. Bahitham presented a number of cultural projects, on top of which was his famous book (Standing on the Water), and he did not have time to revise a draft of a fictional work documenting social life in the Hijaz region in an ancient historical period, according to those close to him. He is the author of dozens of narrative texts, poems, and scattered critical readings. He wrote in several columns, the last of which was his column (Trench) in Al-Riyadh newspaper, and he translated some foreign stories.
He died on October 1, 2002, after suffering from illness, and after writing his last poem, bequeathing to his daughter, Dima, the child who today has become a young woman who boasts of her father's genius and delicate sense. In it, he said, “Take a fringe of your father’s madness, and renounce some of my imminent death
– If I get scared –
So hide between my veins
My old songs
Khaled Al-Jarallah (Jeddah)