#middle eastern poetry

notjustcookies:

Tip their mouths open to the sky.
Turquoise, amber,
the deep green with fluted handle,  
pitcher the size of two thumbs,  
tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower  
which could have lived invisibly  
in loose soil beside the road,  
sprig of succulent rosemary,
bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,  
thread, fragment, breath.  
And it bends. It waits all day.
As the bread cools and the children  
open their gray copybooks  
to shape the letter that looks like  
a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal
perfectly arranged inside the larger petal
or the way tinted glass filters light.  
Men and boys, praying when they died,
fall out of their skins.
The whole alphabet of living,  
heads and tails of words,
sentences, the way they said,   “
Ya’Allah!” when astonished,  
or “ya’ani” for “I mean”—
a crushed glass under the feet
still shines.          
But the child of Hebron sleeps
with the thud of her brothers falling  
and the long sorrow of the color red.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Small Vases from Hebron” from Fuel.

Source: poetryfoundation

tansheer:

Alexandria tugged silver sardines onto the shore
a disappointment she witnessed by the sand
an hour spent in wait
for the net to reach land
by the transgressing microbuses
coughing death into her sea,
we waited and watched
and tiny silver sardines twinkled
under the clouded sky,
I worshipped her
while watching her shake
from utter disappointment.

I cried elegies for my city
when a woman with a tied up head
lost a shoe to a puddle by tramVictoria,
granny begging in brown chuckled
sense of humor alive
despite the cataract clouding her life
and the grit in her crumbling teeth.

My people have nothing but Allah
and comedy
keeping them sane.

A boy who spoke emotional tales of science
muttered fears between sedative clouds.
On her boulders he rummaged
through theories to back up all of God,
and I understood my self,
the events around
and inside of us
were beginning to make sense.

Give me one day
where I need not maneuver cautiously
through my own streets,
no mother’s-body-part cussing
in the name of Allah and vindicated manhood.
One day without dreams of meat
being unrealistic, one day
without the hunger that’s lead to animal methods
of survival, immorality normalized.

Protect me for one day, Alexandria,
carry me through your moody Sea,
don’t let me drown—
Don’t drown me,
don’t drown me, Alexandria.

—
naira badawi

bipolarscribbles:

is a man a father
if he has never seen
the chaos in his sons
heart or if he has never
kissed his sons bruised
knuckles?

-Ibn: son of