A Poem for Syria: Beyond A Geography of Violence (TED)
I close my eyes and try to visualize every detail
the last time I saw you
It was 7 years ago today
We celebrated with family
Never appreciated you when I had you
Oh summer romance shaded by jasmine shrubs
I plead with heaven to re-unite us
So I can be cleansed in your waters
Mediterranean blue
Brushed with eastern winds
I close my eyes to remember
You wore conquest & triumph on your face
Lines 16,000 years deep
Were robed in layers of empire
Chest puffed in a warrior’s armor
I knew you from stories
Stories longer than a bedouin’s night
But then you stretched out your hand
Offering me mint tea, hand-picked cherries + green pistachios
From your garden
From qasida to qabbani
Your poetry of the ancients charmed me
Maqam bayati emanating from oud strings
A sweetness as smooth as olive oil
And as captive as honey
I close my eyes
And watch you moving from ruku to sujud
To the rhythm of church bells
You practiced every faith
You marveled at the devotion of each one
Sealing seder songs with suras
Burying Christian honorifics in an artery wrapped around minarets
I close my eyes & remember
Personality cult posters streaming down buildings
Reconfigured language
Subversive jokes
Rearview mirror amulets
Remember, that if it didn’t please you
You silenced dissent
Ignored & exacerbated debilitating poverty
A poverty so humiliating
That many followed a death march towards intangible dignity
So crooked & meanderings is this story of our love affair
I beg for a vision of the straight path
Sometimes I’m saddled with indignation
Why won’t you let my heart break in peace
To the dawn calm of silence
Offer me a morning without rockets, shelling or torture
An afternoon free of hunger, homelessness or longing
Save me an evening of suffocating uncertainty, chemical attacks or propaganda
Some days I wake
And I see your tears in my father’s eyes
Your hurt in the cold shoulder and weighted heart of my mother
What part of my world I trade to see you again?
But I? I’m generations displaced
Arabic sterilized of its poetry
forever wandering for home
Tormented incessantly as if inherited
Bandages, exposed flesh,
you are a silent film rehearsed nightly on evening news
Little did they know that your mother died a time too long ago
The scent of musk rose from a buried corpse under rubble
Always rubble
Stone, rubble,
Stone, rubble
my dear Syria you are every filter I use to see the world
temples, gardens, courtyards
biblical lands in a prison state
you are more than a geography of violence
How I yearn for its people to have a voice loud & searing enough to quiet white noise
That distorts stories old and human
I stare at your face
A mirror
Though my father left in 1968
I too am a refugee camp,
A carcass in an open graveyard
A wish at the bottom of the sea
And then
I close my eyes &
I beg your understanding
Belonging to everywhere
Neglected by everyone
She birthed myths, legends, mid-wifed pagan gods, jewish prophets, chirstian saints, Islamic knowledge,
My grandparents
And a time ago,
perhaps too far for our collective memory
she buried their remains with dignity
Bruised
Starved
Kingdoms come down
A mother rising from fatherlands
Do we have a place in our hearts to love the battered mother who
Reared prophets,
Carried temples on her spine,
And spread legs wide to labor Fertile Crescent
She who knocks down would-be kings
From the throne of the suns
With the dust of laurel leaves
She fingerpaints their demise in cuneiform
Milked goats to feed a rasul’s kin
Placed a Baptist in elizabeth’s womb
She tosses back orange blossom water
Soothing belly inflamed by parasites of war
She rinses tongues in the Euphrates
Purifying the sins of our ancestors
Crooning freedom songs
She stomps on borders and treaties
Inked by madmen
She runs with hawks and wolves across a land between two rivers
Al-zaba/Bat-Zabbai
Descendant of Cleopatra
Queen of the desert
Maimed lover
She’s been witness too many times to catastrophe before
So she knows
Another sky awaits