Countries That Do Not Know the Sun
I promised myself to ignore
that pain that crushes the heart.
It imagines itself like the veins of a tree rooted below,
while it imagines that I do not feel it.
I promised myself to ignore
that I live here and there,
that visitors come and go
while I am not here.
We go to war
while we remain in our place.
We stitch together a conversation that does not fit us,
while what we want to say remains silent,
pressed inside the heart,
in a hope that never opened
and a pain that cannot be ignored.
Nothing is in its place.
Truth lies gagging under rubble.
Suicide is a chronic matter.
Out of the sheer ordinariness of it,
its voice draws close to my ear
after midnight every night.
It says:
Do not forget to prepare breakfast for the children before death.
Do not forget to kill the killer before death.
Do not forget to lend your clothes and your poems,
even your solitude,
to a woman
who believes life is possible without suicide.
Chatter in every direction.
Screens are the homes of trivialities.
Even in the new books,
and the books yet to be written,
they have turned life into another kind of death,
into words
with no meaning.
They turn us into conversations
that do not fit our true sizes.
There is no longer a clock on the wall
to tell you when to read, when to feel compassion, when to love.
Eyes are wedged into phones.
They divide our children
as they divided our countries.
They divide our dreams
as they divided our countries.
The street hears noise below the street
and does not turn.
It hears of a war happening every day
and does not turn.
Of a massacre repeated
and does not turn.
Robots pass around trivial things,
while children
in the middle part of the earth
are forced to choose
between one death and another.
Forced to choose …
The sun is necessary
in countries that do not know the sun,
so we can ignore the darkness in our world
and the pain
that crushes our heart.
O Israeli missile
Memory
is not neutral
It excels at destroying the heart.
It chooses what it wills.
Sometimes it chooses what time cannot repair.
Grief is too vast to be measured in words.
Something like a homeland,
it hurts us, and we cannot escape it,
even as it keeps trying to push us out,
while we cling to its funerals …
A home in a four-story building,
on the first floor
Inside, a library forty years old.
Every book a bird’s wing to another world,
skilled at dismantling prisons
I raised it as I raised my two sons.
The entire building collapsed in a second,
by a merciful Israeli missile!
It killed all the books at once—
no need for them to suffer.
Its mercy turned the building into pebbles,
so passersby can barely feel
that a building once stood here,
and a library …
Next time,
O Israeli missile, turn me into pebbles
and leave my books alone.
Homes fall in seconds – Neighbourhood video in Beirut, March 28, 2025
