A Tear and a Smile

By Kahlil Gibran

A Tear and a Smile is a collection of early prose poems by Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran, first published in Arabic in 1914. The short pieces, written while Gibran was in his twenties, explore love, beauty, nature, death, the soul and social injustice, often in the form of parables and lyrical meditations. They show many of the themes he would develop in later works such as The Prophet.