The Screams of War: Selected Poems

 I WANT TO UNHURRIEDLY DREAM ABOUT YOU  

Syria that I yearn for  

𓆏Put 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 shop’s 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  

ไand hide in the mountain near Ibn Arabi’s shrine.  

ꦇThe 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:  

ꦫhere 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