What’s Wrong With Our President?

I never fret, and will always say
A word, for which, I am responsible
That the president is a compassionate man
Constantly, busy working for his people

Busy, gathering their money
Outside, in Switzerland, saving it for us
In secret bank accounts
Poor guy, looking out for our future

Can’t you see his kindly heart?
In faith and good conscience
He only starves you; so you’d lose the weight
O what a people! In need of a diet

O the ignorance! You talk of “unemployment”
And how conditions have become dysfunctional
The man just wants to see you rested
Since when was rest such a burden???

And this talk of the resorts
Why do they call them political prisons??
Why do you have to be so suspicious?
He just wants you to have some fun

With regards to “The Chair”
It is without a doubt
All our fault!!
Couldn’t we buy him a Teflon Chair?

I swear, you mistreated the poor man
He wasted his life away, and for what?
Even your food, he eats it for you!
Devouring all that’s in his way

After all this, what’s wrong with our president?

--- Ahmed Fouad Negm; trans. Walaa Quisay

There is a relationship between war and words

There is a relationship between war and words.
There is a relationship between love and words.
I choose my battle in words.
I make fire by words.
I save some people in words; make victims in words
This is my playground. I fight by words
The violence inside me will come out in words
So that there is no blood.

---Yehia Jaber

A Pebble

The day after the flood
A stagnant morning
There is a tear at the bottom of the world
Frozen like an orphan pebble

The hurricane obliterates everything
Palmtrees, houses, boats, bicycles and minarets
But this pebble stays

right there, shining faintly
Because the hand of eternity
Has polished its bald head just like the Lord’s shoeshine:

There it is under your foot. Step on it if you wish. Step hard

Then cross over. Fear not
Among pebbles, it is no more than
a pebble.

--- Sargon Boulus. Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon. From Sargon Boulus, `Azma Ukhra li-Kalb al-Qabila (Beirut/Baghdad: Dar al-Jamal, 2008)]

The Game

He is a poor pawn.
He always jumps to the next square.
He doesn’t turn left or right
and doesn’t look back.
He is moved by a foolish queen
who cuts across the board
lengthwise and diagonally.
She doesn’t tire of carrying the medals
and cursing the bishops.
She is a poor queen
moved by a reckless king
who counts the squares every day
and claims that they are diminishing.
He arranges the knights and rooks
and dreams of a stubborn opponent.
He is a poor king
moved by an experienced player
who rubs his head
and loses his time in an endless game.
He is a poor player
moved by an empty life
without black or white.
It is a poor life
moved by a bewildered god
who once tried to play with clay.
He is a poor god.
He doesn’t know how
to escape
from his dilemma.

---Dunya Mikhail
[translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow]

Shahrayaristry

I stand accused of Shahrayaristry
By friends
By enemies,
Accused of Shahrayaristry,
Of collecting women
Like stamps or empty matchbooks,
Of pinning them up
On the walls of my room.
They call me narcissistic,
Oedipal, sadistic...
Accusing me of every known disorder
To prove themselves educated
And me a deviant.

Nobody will hear my testimony,
My love.
The judges are biased
The witnesses bribed.
I am declared guilty
Before I testify.
Nobody, my love,
Understands my childhood
For I am from a city
That has no love for children,
That knows no innocence,
That has never bought one rose
Or book of poetry,
A city of rough hands,
Of hard feelings and hearts
Calcified by swallowed glass and nails.
I come from a city of ice walls
Whose children are dead of frostbite.

I make no apologies, have no intentions
To hire a lawyer
Or save my head from rope.
A thousand times they hung me
Till my neck got used to hanging,
And my body to the ambulance.

I make no apologies, have no hopes
For an innocent verdict
From any man,
But in a public hearing
I will tell you alone
Before my mere accusers,
Who tried me for possessing more than one woman
For hoarding perfumes, rings, combs
And other rationed things in wartime:
I love you alone,
I cling to you
As the peel to the pomegranate,
The tear to the eye
And the knife to the wound.

I want to say
If just this once
That I have never followed Shahrayar,
I am no murderer
And have never melted women in acid,
But am a poet,
Writing out loud,
Loving out loud.

I am a green-eyed child
Hanged on the gates of a childless city.

--- By Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

*Shahrayar=The King

Slip

I count up the corpses and aircraft
Falling in pieces from the news
I count the bullets that are exhumed,
The bullets that are buried
And the bullets preparing
To be shot loose.
I follow the ritual of food.
I finish my plate
By eating the plate
After a day of hard labor.

When did I get this heartless?
Tomorrow, I'll make room in a corner of your chest
Where I can cry
And I just might exhume the corpse out of my chest
And prepare a ritual
Of proper burial.

---By Nawal Naffaa
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Your Love

My dear with the deep eyes, Your love
is extreme,
mystical
sacred.
Like birth and death, your love
is unrepeatable.

---Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

I'm No Teacher

I am no teacher
To teach you how to love,
For the fish need no teacher
To teach them to swim
And birds need no teacher
To teach them flight.
Swim on your own.
Fly on your own.
Love comes with no textbooks
And the greatest lovers in history were illiterate.

---Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Refinement by Reading your Body

The day the conversation ended
Between your breasts awash in water
And the tribes that battled over water,
That day ended our Golden Age
And began the Age of Decay.
The rainclouds went on strike and said no rain
For the next five hundred years
The spring birds went on strike and stopped all flying
And the ears of grain abstained from procreation
And the fertile crescent moon took on the shape
Of a bottle full of crude oil.

The day they exiled me from the tribe
For leaving a poem and a rose
At the doorflap of your tent,
That day ended our Golden Age
And began the Age of Decay
An age that knew its grammar and syntax
But not a thing of womanhood,
The generations of degeneration
And the erasure of all women's names
From the memory of the nation.

Oh darling
What kind of nation is this,
Policing love like a dirty cop,
Considering the rose
A conspiracy against the regime,
Considering the poem
A manifesto of the underground?
What kind of nation is this
In the form of a yellow locust
Crawling out on its gut from the ocean to the Gulf
From the Gulf to the ocean,
Talking like a holy man all day
And woozy over a woman's navel all night?

What kind of nation is this?
Deleting love's material from curricula.
Deleting poetry,
And women's eyes.
What kind of nation is this?
Going to war with every raincloud,
Opening a classified file for every breast
And filing a police report for every rose.

Oh darling
What are we to do in this nation?
This nation that dare not see its body in the mirror
For fear of craving it?
That dare not hear a woman's voice on the phone
For fear of being too impure to pray?
What are we to do in this nation
That knows all there is to know
Of the October revolution,
Of the Zanj slaves who rose against their Caliph master
Of the Karmathians who stood against the Caliph's armies
And still keeps talking down to women like some Sheikh?
What are we to do in this nation
Between the works of Imam Ash-Shafi'i... and the works of Lenin
Between Qur'anic exegeses.... and Playboy magazines
Between Mu'tazilism... and the music of The Beatles?

O darling dumbfounder, you
Who amaze me like a child's toy,
I feel civilized
For loving you.
I call my poems historical
Because they have been your contemporaries.
All time before your eyes had yet to be,
All time after them went to pieces.
Do not ask me why I'm with you.
I just want an escape from being backwater,
To re-enter the time of water,
I want to defect from the Republic of Thirst,
To leave my backward desert life,
To sit beneath the trees
And bathe in springwater
And learn the names of the flowers.

I want you to teach me to read and write
For writing on your body is the ABC
Of entry into civilization.
Your body is not counterculture.
No, it is culture incarnate.
Whoever does not read the notebooks of your body
Will spend his life illiterate.

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Why

Why do you ask me to write to you?
Why do you ask me
To go naked before you
Like a paleolithic?
Writing is the one thing that leaves me naked.
When I speak
I keep somewhat clad.
When I write
I roam light,
Free as a legendary bird.
When I write
I divorce myself from history
And from earth's gravity
To orbit in the outer space of your eyes.

--- Nizar Qabbani
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Two Poems of Resistance

First Poem

We neither want to live in a palace.
Nor do we love the leaders.
We are a people who kill degradation and misery.
We are a people who destroy the foundation of oppression.
We are a people who do not want the people to remain in this setback.

Second Poem

(A dialogue between Hamad bin Khalifa and Iblis, the Devil, takes place on a table set with the suffering of the people)

Devil: Hamad, have some fear of God, on their behalf.
My heart is in pieces over them.
I and I, Iblis, by God, now want to put my hands in theirs.
Turn against you, my tyrant.
Kneel this hour before their prophet,
And return to my Lord,
As I am distraught by the way they are chased.

Hamad: You have taught me, my supporter,
How to renounce them,
With humiliation and degradation and disasters
For which I blame them.
And the time has come, little brother Iblis,
When you act as their mediator.
Your identity appears to have been shaken
By their father, by their consciousness


Devil: Yes, Hamad, your people have shaken me.
Don’t you hear their cries?
Don’t you see the crowds?
Don’t you see their case?
Listen to their complaints,
To their attempt to plan their steps.
Listen to your people’s cries, which you have purchased,
Hamad.


Hamad: My stomach still has not had its fill of their blood,
Little brother Iblis.
I have yet to nationalize the rest of my family and their wives.
I have yet to decree the uncivilized become machines.
I have yet to leave every candle at the streetlight,
Imploring every passerby:
I have water, come, buy.
I have yet to torture every mu’amam in this land,
Every youth and child,
And push into my prisons the blossom of youth,
And open for degradation a thousand doors,
And force all the people to cry for their lamentations.
Still, little brother Iblis, the number of youth hasn’t risen,
Each one of them, a diploma on his chest.
No occupation and no pre-occupation left to them.
I still have not had every Indian on this land.
Hold in his hand our flag and cheer: “Long live, Abu Sleiman!”
I still have not sucked their blood.
From the scourge of rents and leases,
From apartment to apartment,
While the uncivilized have homes and lands,
But they still number 120.
I don’t think anyone hears their echoes.


Devil: Listen.
How could the Hajji say the world?
If 120 and their echoes don’t reach?
Look, Abu Sleiman, my brave pupil,
Your treachery has surpassed your teacher’s.
Your people in revolt have aged me.
And their brothers have aged me.
Sunni, Shi’a are brothers.
There is no division among them.
But your heart is like stone.
Will you heed some advice from
Your supporter, oppressive one?
Pack up your regime’s encampment,
Until they are satisfied.
Because your people, my darling …
You are not at their level.

---Ayat al-Qormezi [ Poet was sentenced to one year in prison. Below are some of her poems, translated to English by Nahrain Al-Mousawi]

With the Land

The land comes near me
drinks from me
leaves its orchards with me
to become a beautiful weapon
defending me

Even when I sleep
the land comes near me
in my dream.
I smuggle its wild thyme
between exiles
I sing its stones
I will even sweat blood
from my veins
to drink its news
so the land comes near me
leaves a stone of love with me
to defend it
and defend me

When I repay it
I will embrace it a thousand times
I will worship it a thousand times
I will celebrate its wedding on my forehead
on the rubble of exiles
and the ruins of prisons

I will drink from it
It will drink from me
So that the Galilee would remain
beauty, struggle, and love
defending it
defending me

I see the land;
a morning that will come
---Rashid Hussein
* Translated by Sinan Antoon. The poem appear in Al-A`mal al-Shi`riyya (al-Taybe: Markaz Ihya’ al-Turath al-`Arabi, 1990)

Without a Passport

I was born without a passport
I grew up
and saw my country
become prisons
without a passport

So I raised a country
a sun
and wheat
in every house
I tended to the trees therein
I learned how to write poetry
to make the people of my village happy
without a passport

I learned that he whose land is stolen
does not like the rain
If he were ever to return to it, he will
without a passport

But I am tired of minds
that have become hotels
for wishes that never give birth
except with a passport

Without a passport
I came to you
and revolted against you
so slaughter me
perhaps I will then feel that I am dying
without a passport

---Rashid Hussein
* Translated by Sinan Antoon. The poem appear in Al-A`mal al-Shi`riyya (al-Taybe: Markaz Ihya’ al-Turath al-`Arabi, 1990)

America, America

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

The French general who raised his tricolor over Nuqrat al-Salman
where I was a prisoner thirty years ago …
in the middle of that U-turn that split the back of the Iraqi army,
the general who loved Saint Emilion wines called Nuqrat al-Salman a fort …
Of the surface of the earth, generals know only two dimensions:
whatever rises is a fort,
whatever spreads is a battlefield.
How ignorant the general was!

But Liberation was better versed in topography.
The Iraqi boy who conquered her front page sat carbonized behind a steering wheel
on the Kuwait-Safwan highway while television cameras
(the booty of the defeated and their identity)
were safe in a truck like a storefront on Rivoli Street.
The neutron bomb is highly intelligent.
It distinguishes between an "I" and an "Identity."

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

Blues
How long must I walk to Sacramento?
How long must I walk to Sacramento?
How long will I walk to reach my home?
How long will I walk to reach my girl?
How long must I walk to Sacramento?
For two days, no boat has sailed this stream,
Two days, two days, two days.
Honey, how can I ride?
I know this stream,
But, O but, O but,
For two days, no boat has sailed this stream.
La Li La La Li La
La Li La La Li La
A stranger becomes afraid.
Have no fear, dear horse.
No fear of the wolves of the wild,
No fear, for the land is my land.
La Li La La Li La
La Li La La Li La
A stranger becomes afraid.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steam-boats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age?
I need neither oil nor America herself,
neither the elephant nor the donkey.
Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this wooden bridge.
I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers.
I need the village, not New York.
Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to the teeth?
Why did you come all the way to distant Basra, where fish used to swim by our doorsteps?
Pigs do not forage here.
I only have these water buffaloes lazily chewing on water lilies.
Leave me alone, soldier.
Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear.
Leave me my migrating birds and the green plumes.
Take your roaring iron birds and your Toma-hawk missiles.
I am not your foe.
I am the one who wades up to the knees in rice paddies.
Leave me to my curse.
I do not need your day of doom.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

America:
let's exchange gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond's golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln or give us no one.

Now as I look across the balcony,
across the summer sky, the summery summer,
Damascus spins, dizzied among television aerials,
then it sinks, deeply,
in the stones of the forts, in towers, in the arabesques of ivory,
and sinks, deeply, far from Rukn el-Din
and disappears far from the balcony.

And now
I remember trees:
the date palm of our mosque in Basra,
at the end of Basra
a bird's beak, a child's secret, a summer feast.
I remember the date palm.
I touch it. I become it, when it falls black without fronds,
when a dam fell, hewn by lightning.
And I remember the mighty mulberry
when it rumbled, butchered with an axe …
to fill the stream with leaves
and birds
and angels
and green blood.
I remember when pomegranate blossoms covered the sidewalks.
The students were leading the workers parade …

The trees die pummeled.
Dizzied, not standing, the trees die.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

We are not hostages, America,
and your soldiers are not God's soldiers …
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the
drowned gods,
the gods of bulls,
the gods of fires,
the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and
blood in a song ‥

We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor,
who emerges out of farmers' ribs,
hungry
and bright,
and raises heads up high …
America, we are the dead.
Let your soldiers come.
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.
We are the drowned ones, dear lady.
We are the drowned.
Let the water come.

--- Saadi Youssef

(translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa)

Solitude

Seven hundred thousand women live single in Paris
Their age between thirty and forty
Unmarried, divorced, or
Mothers
The voice of the announcer was so neutral
Chewing this plain number from among the many details of modern life
Closing the news with it
Seven hundred thousand single women
O man!
And for four hours you have been tormenting yourself before a computer
In search of good sentences that express hard life without a woman.

---Abdel-ilah Salhi

Write down ! I am an Arab

Write down !
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks..
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew

My father.. descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather..was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman’s hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!

Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks..
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!

Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate poeple
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food

Beware..
Beware..
Of my hunger
And my anger!
---Mahmoud Darwish

Unadikum ( I Call on You )

I call on you
I clasp your hands
I kiss the ground under your feet
And I say: I offer my life for yours
I give you the light of my eyes
as a present
and the warmth of my heart
The tragedy I live
is but my share of your tragedies
I call on you
I clasp your hands
I was not humiliated in my homeland
Nor was I diminished
I stood up to my oppressors
orphaned, nude, and barefoot
I carried my blood in my palm
I never lowered my flags
I guarded the green grass
over my ancestor’s graves
I call on you
I clasp your hands

---Tawfiq Zayyad (1929-1994)

The Will of Life

“If, one day, a people desires to live, then fate will answer their call.

And their night will then begin to fade, and their chains break and fall.

For he who is not embraced by a passion for life will dissipate into thin air,

At least that is what all creation has told me, and what its hidden spirits declare…”

---Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi. Translated by Elliott Colla.

######################################################

If the people will to live
Providence is destined to favourably respond
And night is destined to fold
And the chains are certain to be broken

And he who has not embraced the love of life
Will evaporate in its atmosphere and disappear.

--- Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi. Translated by As’ad Abu Khalil.

I am the People

I am the people, marching, and I know my way
My struggle is my weapon, my determination my friend
I fight the nights and with my hopes’ eyes
I determine where true morning lies
I am the people, marching, and I know my way

I am the people. My hand lights life
Makes deserts green, devastates tyrants
Raising truths, banners on guns
My history becomes my lighthouse and comrade
I am the people, marching, and I know my way

No matter how many prisons they build
Mo matter how much their dogs try to betray
My day will break and my fire will destroy
Seas of dogs and prisons out of my way

I am the people and the sun is a rose in my sleeve
The day’s fire horses galloping in my blood
My children will defeat every oppressor
Who can stand in my way?

I am the people, marching, and I know my way.

---Ahmed Fouad Nigm

The Dragon

A dictator, hiding behind a nihilist's mask,
has killed and killed and killed,
pillaged and wasted,
but is afraid, he claims,
to kill a sparrow.
His smiling picture is everywhere:
in the coffeehouse, in the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.
Satan used to be an original,
now he is just the dictator's shadow.
The dictator has banned the solar calendar,
abolished Neruda, Marquez, and Amado,
abolished the Constitution;
he's given his name to all the squares, the open spaces,
the rivers,
and all the jails in his blighted homeland.
He's burned the last soothsayer
who failed to kneel before the idol.
He's doled out death as a gift or a pledge.
His watchdogs have corrupted the land,
stolen the people's food,
raped the Muses,
raped the widows of the men who died under torture,
raped the daughters and widows of his soldiers
who lost the war,
from which, like rabbits in clover fields,
they had run away,
leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants,
writers and artists,
twenty-year-old children,
carpenters and ironsmiths,
hungry and burned under the autumn sky,
all forcibly led to slaughter,
killed by invaders, alien and homegrown.
The dictator hides his disgraced face in the mud.
Now he is having a taste of his own medicine,
and the pillars of deception have collapsed,
his picture is now underfoot,
trampled by history's worn shoes.
The deposed dictator is executed in exile,
another monster is crowned in the hapless homeland.
The hourglass restarts,
counting the breaths of the new dictator,
lurking everywhere,
in the coffeehouse, the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.


2
From the Caribbean to China's Great Wall,
the dictator-dragon is being cloned.
When will you do it, St George?


---"The Dragon", by the Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayyati (1926-1999) was originally published in 1996. The translation appearing on this page is by Farouk Abdel Wahab, Najat Rahman, and Carolina Hotchandani. It is from the volume Iraqi Poetry Today (ISBN 095338246X) (c) 2003, edited by Saadi Simawe.