The Screams of War: Selected Poems

 I WANT TO UNHURRIEDLY DREAM ABOUT YOU  

Syria that I yearn for  

Put your long war aside under the shade of a tree  

I want to unhurriedly dream about you  

without shedding a single tear… 

SYRIA  

Once only a few miles away,  

now thousands apart.  

The door ajar,  

the alleyways,  

and the bird breasts glimmering on coals  

like the planet Venus. 

THE UTOPIAN POET  

All that blood that is flooding the television and the diesel motors  

was never enough to raise a scream  

it made the utopian poet write a sentence about the naked humans:  

they die and their souls rest until the end of the night  

like trees from faraway fields. 

THE STATUES OF MIDDAY  

My friends are the brothers of darkness,  

statues of midday,  

nothing left from their features  

beside the smell of the hand extended to the waiter  

behind the coffee shop라이브 바카라 window.  

A harsh hand, frozen from the cold,  

flaunting,  

or blinking like a tearful eye.  

AN ANGEL FROM THE MIDDLE AGES  

I am thinking, for example, that we take a taxi  

and hide in the mountain near Ibn Arabi라이브 바카라 shrine.  

The photographers want to seize from your time a moment to capture a photo of you on  

the road to Damascus  

while your children are waiting for you in the house of John the Baptist:  

here where a whole life is being lived for an angel from the Middle Ages.  

At that time  

in that place where the wounds are taller than the stones  

and where wings grow on people 

I want to reach you barefoot  

and I do not have enough money for the road.  

Cut from a leaning tree in front of your house.  

I want to run back to being twenty-one years old  

because I am unable to forget the scent of your body  

in the city of the blind . . .  

Translated by Jonas Elbousty; with permission from Seagull Books