I wish children didn’t die

“I wish children didn’t die.

 I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. 

Then they would return home safe, 

and when their parents would ask them: “where were you?”, 

they would say: “we were playing in the clouds”.

– Ghassan Kanafani

Like a Cloud, We Travel

Wiped out by every wind over Gaza,
we are scattered on this earth,
footsteps in the desert.

We do not, or cannot, know
when and how to return
to the homes
our ancestors loved
for centuries.

Like clouds,
we try to give shade and rain:
the best we can.

But deep down, we do not know
whether we even belong
to where we happen to exist.

Like clouds,
we might visit our homes
without knowing that they still are
ours.

Invaders have changed much
of our landscape,
much or our lives.

--- Mosab Abu Toha

"Our Country is a Graveyard"

"Gentlemen, you have transformed
our country into a graveyard
You have planted bullets in our heads,
and organized massacres
Gentlemen, nothing passes like that
without account
All that you have done
to our people is
registered in notebooks".

---  Tawfiq Ziyad

We Love What We Have

We love what we have, no matter how little,
because if we don’t, everything will be gone. If we don’t
we will no longer exist, since there will be nothing here for us.
What’s here is something that we are still
building. It’s something we cannot yet see,
because we are part
of it.
Someday soon, this building will stand on its own, while we,
we will be the trees that protect it from the fierce
wind, the trees that will give shade
to children sleeping inside or playing on swings.

--- Mosab Abu Toha

A Country Called Song

I lived in a country called Song:
Countless singing women made me
a citizen,
and musicians from the four corners
composed cities for me with mornings and nights,
and I roamed through my country
like a man roams through the world.

My country is a song,
and as soon as it ends, I go back
to being a refugee

--- Najwan Darwish, 

Tr. by Kareem J. Abu-Zeid

I grant you refuge

1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket

from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.

I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.

2.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.

They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.

Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.

3.
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”

4.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and death,
refuge in the glory of our siege,
here in the belly of the whale.

Our streets exalt God with every bomb.
They pray for the mosques and the houses.
And every time the bombing begins in the North,
our supplications rise in the South.

5.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and suffering.

With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.

I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.

---  Hiba Abu Nada

(trans. Huda Fakhreddine)

Source: Protean Magazine

INTERPRETATIONS

A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing.
The old lady
thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,
the young woman
thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,
the child
thinks he is drawing,
the businessman
thinks he is considering a deal,
the tourist
thinks he is writing a postcard,
the employee
thinks he is calculating his debts.
The secret policeman
walks, slowly, towards him.

- Mourid Barghouti

Oh rascal children of gaza

Oh rascal children of gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me 

with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning 

with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase

and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back –
and scream as you want and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…

--- Khaled Juma

“Think of Others”

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).

--- Mahmoud Darwish

You and I

You’re beautiful like a liberated homeland

I’m exhausted like a colonized one.

You’re sad as a forsaken person, fighting on

I’m agitated as a war near at hand.

You’re desired like the end of a raid

I’m terrified as if I’m searching the debris.

You’re brave like a trainee pilot

I’m as proud as his grandmother may be.

You’re anxious like a patient’s dad,

I’m as calm as his nurse.

You’re as sweet as dew

And to grow, I need you.

We’re both as wild as vengeance

We’re both as gentle as forgiveness.

You’re strong like the court’s pillars

I’m bewildered like I’ve endured prejudice.

And whenever we meet

We talk, without pause, like two lawyers

Defending

The world…


--- Mourid Barghouti (Translator: Dina Al-Mahdy)

The Veil of Religions

If You are One
And Your teachings are one,
Why did You engrave our infancy in the tablets of the Torah,
And ornament our youth with the Gospels
Only to erase all that in Your Final Book?
Why did You draw us, the ones who acknowledge Your Oneness,
Into disagreement?
Why did You multiply in us
When You are the One and Only?

--- Amal Al-Jubouri
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Without Mercy

There is a sweet music,
but its sweetness fails to console you.
This is what the days have taught you:
in every long war
there is a soldier, with a distracted face and ordinary teeth,
who sits outside his tent
holding his bright-sounding harmonica
which he has carefully protected from the dust and blood,
and like a bird
uninvolved in the conflict,
he sings to himself
a love song
that does not lie.

For a moment,
he feels embarrassed at what the moonlight might think:
what’s the use of a harmonica in hell?

A shadow approaches,
then more shadows.
His fellow soldiers, one after the other,
join him in his song.
The singer takes the whole regiment with him
to Romeo’s balcony,
and from there,
without thinking,
without mercy,
without doubt,
they will resume the killing!

--- Mourid Barghouti (translation: Radwa Ashour)

“Al Midan”

Dark Egyptian hands that know how to characterize

Reach out through the roar to destroy the frames

The creative youth came out and turned autumn into spring

They have performed the miracle and raised the murdered from murder

Kill me, killing me will not bring back your country

In my blood I shall write a new life for my home

My blood is it or the spring? Both in green color

Am I smiling because of my happiness or my sorrows?

--- Abdel Rahman al-Abnoudi

I Am Syrian

I am a Syrian. Exiled,
in and out of my homeland,
and
on knife blades with swollen feet I walk.
I am a Syrian: Shiite, Druze, Kurd,
Christian, and I am Alawite, Sunni, and Circassian.

Syria is my land.
Syria is my identity. My sect is the scent of my homeland,
the soil after the rain,
and my Syria is my only religion.
I am a son of this land, like the olives
apples pomegranates chicory cacti mint grapes figs ...
So what use are your thrones,
your Arabism,
your poems,
and your elegies?
Will your words bring back my home
and those who were killed accidentally?
Will they erase tears shed on this soil?

 
I am a son of that green paradise,
my hometown,
but today,
I am dying from hunger and thirst.
Barren tents in Lebanon and Amman are now my refuge,
but no land except my homeland
will nourish me with its grains,
nor will all the cloudsin this universe quench my thirst.

---Youssef Abu Yihea, Translated by Ghada Alatrash

Two Poems by Mourid Barghouti

PRISON

Man said:
blessed are the birds in their cages
for they, at least,
know the limits
of their prisons.

SILENCE

Silence said:
truth needs no eloquence,
After the death of the horseman,
the homeward-bound horse
says everything
without saying anything.

--- Mourid Barghouti (translated by Radwa Ashour)

My Poem Will Not Save You

Remember the toddler lying face down
on the sand, and the waves gently receding
from his body as if a forgotten dream?

My poem will not turn him onto his back
and lift him up
to his feet
so he can run
into a familiar lap
like before.
I am sorry
my poem will not
block the shells
when they fall
onto a sleeping town,
will not stop the buildings
from collapsing
around their residents,
will not pick up the broken-leg flower
from under the shrapnel,
will not raise the dead.

My poem will not defuse
the bomb
in the public square.
It will soon explode
where the girl insists
that her father buy her gum.

My poem will not rush them
to leave the place
and ride the car
that will just miss the explosion.
Many mistakes in life
will not be corrected by my poem.
Questions will not be answered.
I am sorry
my poem will not save you.

My poem cannot return
all of your losses,
not even some of them,
and those who went far away
my poem won’t know how to bring them back
to their lovers.
I am sorry.
I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.

Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm,
and when we need to touch the soul
to know it’s not dead
their songs
give us that touch.

--- Dunya Mikhail

“In Jerusalem”

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.

I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly

then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.

I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:

Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.

--- Mahmoud Darwish

रोशनी क़ंदील से ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है

रोशनी क़ंदील से ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है
कविता नोटबुक से ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है
और चुंबन होंठों से अधिक सार्थक
मेरे तुमको लिखे ख़त
हम दोनों से अधिक महान और महत्वपूर्ण हैं
वही अकेले दस्तावेज़ हैं जहाँ
लोग खोज निकालेंगे
तुम्हारा हुस्न
और मेरी दीवानगी

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by पूजा प्रियंवदा

“To Our Land”

To our land,
and it is the one near the word of god,
a ceiling of clouds

To our land,
and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns,
the map of absence

To our land,
and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed,
a heavenly horizon ... and a hidden chasm

To our land,
and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings,
holy books ... and an identity wound

To our land,
and it is the one surrounded with torn hills,
the ambush of a new past

To our land, and it is a prize of war,
the freedom to die from longing and burning
and our land, in its bloodied night,
is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far
and illuminates what’s outside it ...

As for us, inside,
we suffocate more

---Mahmoud Darwish

The Impossible

It is much easier for you
To push an elephant through a needle’s eye,
Catch fried fish in galaxy,
Blow out the sun,
Imprison the wind,
Or make a crocodile speak,
Than to destroy by persecution
The shimmering glow of a belief
Or check our march
Towards our cause
One single step…

---Tawfiq Zayyad (1929-1994)