My youth? Long gone,
and the now-young
have slashed their veins.

Our heady days are ash,
the wilderness of our dreams
has vanished like a mirage,

night smashed our hope, and we
had to swallow all that.
That’s destiny for you.

Why gather in the world
of yearning? Why not keep
us apart? Don’t ask me

how we got lost;
we were mixed up back then,
living love one day,

missing it the next,
so don’t blame me if I turn
our life into song: I live

in the poem’s ever-stream.
Do you see the clump of days
left like flowers in the night?

Don’t be like roses people
toss in the streets the way night
did us, destiny’s playthings.

Despite the map of my wounds,
I got lost. Despite the gag
of the past, I’ll sing on.

Innocence can’t survive these times, so I come to love you
before the void. We dreamed of a haven for refugees,
shelter for birds, water for palms. We watched spring turn to ash,

the sun burn itself away, the river of wine become blood.
The edge of my own pride was both border and blade.
Just look at how my hand can close.

But your love is my shade and my Nile,
and the ragged path of hope is still a path.
Come—we still dream within weariness.

Come—any day’s light is still daylight,
and at night the moon still beams.
Love, we are pure revelation.

Love threads every agony, kindles the lost.
Consider: if I pulled the shutters, and squandered the faith
that made me, would that grieving quell anguish?

Since our eyes are pale night, faint light, let’s send fire
into the abyss, shout in the impossible silence,
and weave a new image of leave-taking.

Inside their tombs, our martyrs are whispering,
Oh God, we are coming back.

On land they are lifting their hands,
and their voices grow in the silence of the grave:
Oh God, we are coming back.

Stones fall, ashes rise, and their eyes beam,
Oh God, we are coming back.

Our martyrs stepped out of their coffins,
lined up and raised the shout:
Shame on you cowards.
Our home is sold, our nation
a herd of sheep, and you sleep.

Our martyrs travel to Al Aqsa Mosque,
they pray in the churches of Lebanon,
they wander the streets of Jerusalem,
they break into prisons in every land.

They rise from the ashes of the captive home
and preach on every corner of a beaten nation.

They call in the midst of massacres,
God is greater than this man-made world,
God is greater than this man-made world,
God is greater than this man-made world.

Our martyrs are approaching, their shouts echoing
on the walls of Beirut. They gather in the streets
to fight in darkness despite the pale light.

In homes bound by humiliation and madness, they call,
Oh God we are coming back.
One day our coffins will light all of Jerusalem.

They are coming back to break into the castle.



On every corner, they ask the cowards,
Why did you tolerate the wolf, sleeping
amidst sheep, a home as whole as the universe
auctioned off, overrun with rats?

Cowards who sold out our broken home,
our living ancestors, there you are
on the screen, drunk in the fuss,
walking Death, hypocrisy, and control,
we will rid our holy dead of you,
and of the irony of the age.

Oh God we are coming back.

Don’t believe that people killed
in a battle for God are dead,
they are still alive in God.

*

Our martyrs, roaring on every corner of the land,
streams of them asking,
Oh living, what are you doing?

Every day you’re double-crossed and slain
like sheep, surrendering your rights,
running like rats to the wolves,
leaving your people weeping

while you are prostrate before America’s
dollars and the images on screen.

Rats in all sorts of compromising ways.

And in the mad laughter of calamity,
a nation is sold into collapse.

Two images collapse into one:

while kneeling,
your heads under their shoes,
and our Arab Jerusalem,
given to wolves by the drunken.



With Lebanon adrift in blood, and tyranny
on the prowl, our martyrs shout
from every corner, Does honor
have a place? Where have the rebels
disappeared? Why have the sellouts fled?

The silent, the forgetful, and the two-tongued
all keep their mouths shut.
If you ask, they give you official nonsense.
If you ask, you get a bullet in the eye.

*

When you march in the parade of commerce
you wind up sold. History shows traitors
no mercy. The flood washes
over all of you chasing death
with the ad-man chasing you
to sell you tomorrow in the slave market.

Our priests are oblivious in their seats,
drunk on the power of reign and rule.

Our people in prison-darkness. All of them asleep.

When do the sleeping awaken?
When the sleeping wake.

I carried all I had through the tangled night, blaming the road
that spurred me backward to green windows, witness

to the hunger of our bodies, witness to the underside
of forever. Alone now in the road’s slow night,

I re-sense the first days’ blush, the flash
of your hand in mine: how do you bear all that is past?

Such bluff inside my boast: I will forget you.
I try to move on, but a shadow slides along, chiding that folly.

Beside the road, pale light seeps into yellow tulips,
and I quicken for what is lost: youth, freedom, dreams.

Aimless, I stare at the ground until dizziness takes me.
Somewhere in the dust of these empty streets where we began:

the warmth of our hands. Somewhere in this dust
our savoring footsteps, somewhere my roving tears.

Like the endless road, my story is here and there at once.
Can I resist the was that beckons? Shall I continue alone?

As your memory strums the chord in my chest,
the threads of my journey unravel, unravel.

You are lamenting love that left one day
for the world of the impossible.

It was a dream, but is there anything
except illusion and make-believe anyway?

Our life is a summer cloud’s thick shade.

You lament love’s autumn folds,
and the division of all we shared.

Who said anything lasts?  Hopes melt
and a sole question remains: Why enter my life

if dreams only turn to sand,
heat-haze blurring into heat-haze?

Yearning always led me
to project my vision onto you,
was a chanting fidelity,
was faith’s hymn through long nights.
Yearning made me fall for you.

Days pass, and adoration swells.
I set my bags at your door
and said goodbye to travel and trouble,
set down all my sins,
forgave their world and its people.

Yearning taught me how to survive
and how to heed the inside.
Now my eyes long light.
Even as yearning made me suffer love,
I still burn deep down.

We promised things, and now we’re strangers.
Love, I have nothing left, but I still believe
in promises. If we are to be no more, know,
know, that I am the one
whose love is beyond this vision.

As long as we are ruled by madness, hounds
will devour fetuses still in their wombs,
mines will sprout in wheat fields, and even
the crossed light of morning will be eye-fire.

We’ll see the young hanged, wronged
at the dawn prayer. It’s an age witness
to a snarling pig fouling mosques.

When madness rules, there are white flowers
on the ruined branches, emptiness
in a child’s eyes, no kindness, no faith, no
dignity held sacred. All fates futureless,

everything present worthless. As long as madness
rules, the children of Baghdad can only guess
why they wander hunger’s thorns,

why they share the bread of death, why off
in the distance, American Indians
hover in the cold, why greed shouts them down,
every race crawling ghost-hearted.

Through blood-colored streets, between humiliation
and disbelief, crippled shadows creep,
and the madness-hounds howl in our minds.

We are on our way to death.



The children of Baghdad scream in the streets
as Hulagu’s army pounds the city’s doors
like an epidemic; his grandchildren roar
over the bodies of our young.

The wings of wild birds are blood rivers,
black claws claw eyes—all this cracks the silence.

The Tigris River remembers those days, so look
behind the curtain of history—how many
aggressors have passed through the centuries
of our land, and still we resist?

Hulagu will die, and the Iraqi children
will dance in front of Degla. We are not
to be hanged from all corners of Baghdad.

*

A river can be a weapon against injustice on the earth.
A palm can be a weapon against injustice.
A garden can be a weapon.

Among the water, in the silence
of tunnels, though we hate death,
for God and right we will set fire forever
to your refusal that Islam is holy.

Baghdad, ***** by tyranny, your children
are raising flags. Where are the Arabs
and the white swords, wild horses, glorious families?

Some of them were condemned, some
fled shameful, some stripped and gave away
their clothes, and some are lined up in the devil’s hall
to get their share of the spoils.

And people ask about a great nation’s ruins,
but nothing remains of that shining empire
that spans from the ocean to the gulf.



Every calamity has its cause.

They sold the horses and traded in
the knights in the market of rhetoric:
Down with history! Long live hot air!

Death comes to the children of Baghdad
in the smallest toys, in the parks, in restaurants,
in the dust. Walls collapse on the procession of history,
shame upon civilization, shame from a thousand borders.

From the unknown, a missile charges,
“Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”

Will daylight come again after the ****** smile
has been erased, after planes block the sunrays,
and our dreams spurt suicidal blood?

By what law do you demolish our homes,
and flood fire upon a thousand minarets?

In Baghdad, days pass, from hunger to hunger,
thirst to thirst, under the gaze of the master
of the mansion, the thousand-masked face.
Will there never be an end to this nonsense?

The curtain rises: we are the beginning.

To starve people—is this honor?
“To prey upon supplicants”—that’s the glorious slogan of victory?
To chase children from one house to another—the joy of tyranny.

These days, people have the right to humiliation, submission,
death in every atom, and the chronic question,
“Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”



The children of Baghdad are playing in schools:
a ball here, a ball there, a child here, a child there,
a pen here, a pen there, a mine here, a death there.
Among the fragments, the cactus.

There were children here yesterday,
fluttering like pigeons in open spaces.
One of these days, dawn might lighten the universe,
but for now the sun of justice is far below the horizon.



Despite sacrifice, there is a dark gluttony:
some are faithful, and some are sellouts.

Oh nation of Mohammad, my heart longs for Al Hussein.
Oh Baghdad, land of Caliph Rasheed,
oh castle of history, and once-glorious age,
the two moments between night and day are death and feast.



Among the martyrs’ fragments,
the throne of the universe, shaken by a young voice.
The dark night leaves when a new day flows.

Oh land of Al Rasheed, don’t lose hope, every tyranny ends:
a child adores Baghdad, holds a white notebook and flowers,
paper and poetry, some piasters from the last feast.

**

Behind his eyes, a tear that won’t break
but flows like light deep in his heart: the picture
of his father who left one day and never returned.
The child embraces ashes, and stays a long time.

A thread of blood runs through his mouth;
his voice and shed blood are one.
His features washed out; all of this world is separation.

The child whispers, I long for Baghdad’s day.
Who said oil is worth more than blood?

Don’t ache, Baghdad, don’t surrender.
Although there is dissent in this blind time,
there is, in the far horizon, a wave of visions.

Although the dream is distant, it rises. Rise,
and spread my bones in the Tigris River,
so daylight will one day rise over my funeral procession.

God is greater than the madness of death.
Who said oil is worth more than blood?