Poem: A Child and a Holiday
Authored by Mohammed Abd al-Rahman Al-Muqrin:
Spend the holiday with your games;
While I celebrated with the sounds of cannon fire.
There is no difference, oh children, between us;
Games fly like iron bombers.
The difference is that I see
Things you have not witnessed: tremors and soldiers.
I know the bombardment that you are unaware of,
As well as the screams of threats.
The disparity lies in the fact that I cannot sleep when night falls,
While your night passes in slumber.
My morning gifts are bullets,
While you enjoy toys and coins.
It does not trouble me that my clothes are patched,
Or that you wear new outfits on this day.
I fought in my youth, my greatest weapon
Being the skin that shields me from icy mountains.
If even a thorn pricks a child, their fathers cannot rest
Until a thousand comforts soothe them.
But I walk upon blood, stained,
With wounds I dress with my own veins.
You cry for a moment when your toys break,
While my tears do not leave my cheeks.
Oh children, I am like you,
A child whose dreams I have nurtured.
Do you have any sweets? I have found nothing
Except a loaf, half eaten by worms.
Do you laugh and play? For I spend my day
Pondering in confusion.
One day, I saw my father die, and my grandmother
Cried as she embraced her lone grandson.
I witnessed my mother as they took her away,
Looking at me with her innocent eyes.
Everyone around me is terrified,
In the presence of a father, a wife, and a child.
This land is no longer my home;
It was once a sanctuary for my father and ancestors.
Innocent homes have been crushed; where are they now,
With their architectural beauty and design?
Now safe homes have turned into graves,
With remains, rubble, and countless souls lost.
The earth that I tread upon calls to me,
Soaked with my tears and built on my prostration.
Oh young child’s smile, it is a crime
To be decayed by bitterness in a spiteful eye.
I never envied you, children, for
Your luxurious lives shrouded in distractions;
Enjoy your games in your festivities,
For I have my own, forged from gunpowder.
I am no longer a child; nothing quenching my thirst
Except a life of despair.
Do not pause your games on the television,
For perhaps the sight of a martyr’s blood
Will disturb your gentle souls from a lifeless body
That lies amidst alluring charms.
I seek no pity from your parents,
For I am more stubborn against my enemies.
They said I am alone; I replied, the guidance has not strayed,
For one who lives in faith is never alone.
They called me an outcast; I said in their dictionary,
In the path of God, one is deemed an outcast.
I could not bear living in subjugation,
Like an eagle who detests its life in shackles.
I am a child, but not in the sense of childhood; for I
Surpass men in my resolve and endurance.
Poem: A Song to Childhood
Authored by Adonis:
In the warm, restless bed lies love,
Awakening,
For people, it is hymns, and for the sun, a path.
For childhood,
The sun shyly rises;
In its footsteps, the vast universe becomes smaller
And eternity compresses,
For it blankets the earth endlessly,
And the world becomes a cradle.
Yesterday…, my moans are a home,
Poverty is my lamp, and the blood that flows is oil.
I was like a shadow, circling in poverty;
My feet are night, and my eyelids are light.
Oh childhood,
Oh spring of the aged time and the March of life,
And the decline of the past and the future;
In tomorrow, you are an unfettered struggle,
An ambition that cannot be denied.
And tomorrow, you are the arenas of your greatness,
Creating and recreating the universe.
In your labor, you sing,
And in your wounds, you find melody,
With the pure blood of a newborn child.
Oh childhood,
Oh the longing of the past and the future,
Oh spring of the aged time and March of life.
Poem: A Mother and a Lost Child
Authored by Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab:
Stay, do not fade away, O sun, for what comes with the night
Is merely the dead; who can return the lost to their kin?
When the darkness shuts off
Paths that have borne fruit at home after an extended absence?
And the ground trembles with the hearts of children from its dark shadows,
From the flickering sparks within that hide in the shade,
From whispers and echoes,
Your ray is like a thread for the needle, drawn by love
To my daughter’s heart from where my pain resides,
And my sighs.
Endless time has passed, thousands of moons passed, and the heart
Counts on the gentle breezes, counting the stars of night;
I count the children’s bags, crying each time they return
From school and the fields.
And, O light of my heart, my solace in the struggles,
My spirit’s wish, my daughter, return to me; here is the food,
And here is the water for my hunger? Here is from my flesh
Food…oh, thirsty child, my mother.
Draw from my blood to quench your thirst and return; everyone has returned,
As if you were Persephone, seized by a beast’s grip,
And her longing mother was less tormented, with fewer illusions
Than the mother who does not know where you went.
In a coffin
On a mountain? Did I cry? Did I laugh? Did the beast rise or sleep?
And when the fire of the night dies, as the slumber swells gently
Over the eyelids, when the storyteller searches in the fire
To glimpse the shadow of Sinbad’s ship
And his voice fades into weakness,
The trails of my blood flow back to you, yearning, as agony crushes me.
Ten years have gone by—ten dark ages.
An eternity has passed since I stood at the door,
Calling, but only the wind replied in the thicket,
Tearing apart my call, sending it back to me while the road is sealed
By what dark fruits and grapes the shadows breathe.
And you dissolve in the light’s fading in the whirlpool of night,
Like a drop of dew
Soaked into the earth; I can almost feel your trace, shattered and broken.
I question all that lingers in the night, every specter and shadow,
Seeking my child,
Did you see my daughter? Did you hear her steps?
When I walk through the crowd,
I shrink every face in my mind that was ever a glimpse of her.
It’s the murmur of dawn over the streams drinking in the dark,
And her forehead, and I see you in all people,
Scattered, as if I were to see you, you in motion.
And now you are caught in youthful charm’s harshness,
Flowing through your veins, gnawing at your breasts and lips
And diffusing perfume around you,
As your poor heart dreams between light and shadow,
Of something, if it materialized, would bring forth death and ecstasy.
And I remember how this troubled world fills its chalice with sorrow;
There is hunger and pain, poverty, and disease.
Are you impoverished, praying for generations in your eyes, for they are destined mouths?
That seek nourishment, searching for it while pathways lie in gloom.
I stare at the faces of the beggars, tormented in ailment,
And colorless, thirst-stricken, you appear within them, I feel my hands
Stretching to them, feeling that my hand is among them, offering the blue of cold
To the sights, as if they are frozen in the vastness of my eyes;
Prayers and blood pour forth.
So I cry for the sake of God as tears choke my voice,
With the threads of salt and water;
And as you linger on my lips, there is yearning,
And in my heart, a faint light that flickered,
Then faded without return, leaving me to search among shadows and echoes.
Poem: The Feet of Children
Authored by Adonis:
I offer you the giant and the smoke,
O gray mare,
Feeding it with oats and barley.
I give you toys,
And dreams and yellow notebooks,
Letters and writing
In the chambers of wisdom and proverbs,
O sun, O sylph of the waterfall and the clouds,
O feet of children.