*Ifriquiya is the Arabized name given to the « Province of Africa, » the name the Romans gave  to Carthage (Tunisia)after they had burned it, which became afterwards the name designating the whole continent of Africa.

To my mother and father in memoriam.
My mother, Jannette, only went to a religious school, that's why she could still manage to teach me Arabic alphabet when I was only four. My dad, Al Houssein, was a small building contractor who built houses for only half of the money he deserved. I miss them so much. The following elegy, even if it is far from being what one might call a masterpiece, is not, to my mind, what one would readily call a technical loss (which means I didn't offer them anything I could lay my hands on).

*the "tongues of fire" ("ألسنة اللّهب") is part of a work of bricolage I sometimes use in my English poems. It consists of subjecting a dead metaphor, a cliché, in Classical Arabic, to a literal English translation and presenting it in such a way that it looks as though it were a new metaphor I invented for the purpose. Another example of this work of bricolage would be the expression "the rain is falling like opened flasks" ("ينزل المطر كأفواه القرب") which is also my literal translation of a very old cliché in Classical Arabic whose equivalent in English would be "it's raining cats and dogs (I might have said this elsewhere).