" الوجع يخلق الأنبياء"

This lunacy is larger than you my love

Its harshness

Its fatal sins

That the delicacy of your untarnished hands can’t endure

Your palms that hold the country’s oranges

A beauty mark on your waist

And your hair strewn 

Over the shoulders of truth

has the saltiness of the sea

And the scent of mud

and the sweetness of both 

***

They have exhausted your innocence my little one

After they had let the fangs of distance

Gnaw on your steps

Weighed down

Loaded with indignation

***

Do not strike me with your startling questions about death

Do not leave them

For me alone

To inflate in my chest like a balloon set to explode

Do not leave me the catastrophe

To guide me as Virgil lead Dante

Through the inferno of the old city

To show him people writhing with disease

Whose pain blisters like a scar

And children compete with dogs for a bone in the trash

So they found it filled with hollow decisions and false facades

And cats clawing at corpses heaped like fields of ruins

And the women who

shouted in God’s ear during their labor

And he did not listen

***

I’m watching your tears my love

Face to face without eyes and legs

With those distorted by the war

And drew in their minds

Maps of loss, worry, and fractures

In streets without shelters and buildings

And hope swaggers, deprived of dreams and trial

And pots deprived of food and aid

Throats quivering of thirst

Persecution of blood without a crucifix

Bodies numbed cold

And two palms for a tent without walls

Here I am my love

With the swelling weight of the question I feel

Entrapped by it

Here it is hung around my neck, a necklace 

Like the noose of one who’s found a reason to hang himself 

***

Oh how pure you are my love

And how unfortunate I am

For nature to determine

The formation of my seed in a world

Full of lunatics and murderers

And the hammers of ecstatic judges

On your torn dress

And ripped off brasier

Which flutters on the ceiling of my room 

And I despise them 

When they chant hymns and verses

of their falsehood

And spewing from their fangs

Their vulgar truths

Onto your white brasier

Coated in the blood of your children

And your exposed breasts

And breaking news bulletins

***

My love

Spill your warm voice

Pour it slowly

Into the throats of your thirsty children

pour it 

And don’t hesitate

To brush the strands

Of your hair lavishly

For those sleeping in the open

And pay no attention

To those who intoxicate themselves to the quiver of your voice

As he cries out from beneath the rubbles

Those who crave the fresh blood on your lips

***

I apologize to you my love

For all that you have witnessed before now

And now

And tomorrow

And for all that will come

And for this air

That is not ashamed of the scent of gunpowder on your neck

And does not choke on your slaughtered voice

Releasing its final breaths