This is from a series of poems written what you will recognize
as the Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát stanza and the Rubáiyát
actually just means quatrain for a stanza of four lines.
But there was also, I mean, many other poets in Farsi
and in Arabic used that form and one of them was classical
Arabic poet called al-Ma'arri who wrote a sequence of these
quatrains called Luzūm--
Luzūm mā lam yalzam which means necessities of what was
unnecessary.
And, which I read in the translation
of the Lebanese poet Ameen Rihani, to which
Fady Joudah alerted me.
And these are mostly, although not entirely, about Syria
and they're dedicated to Fady and to the Syrian poet
Golan Haji.
''The politicians lie and having lied make grand pronouncements
about genocide.
Red lines, civilization, and the rest elsewhere from anywhere
anyone died.
Midsummer's lingering azure was misspent.
The morning light is late and different.
A man in Ghouta on a shopping street held his son's hand.
Now tell me where they went?
The left knows intervention by the West
would be imperial self-interest.
The teacher came out of the bakery
and took a sniper's bullet in her chest.
The children whine and sulk or break things,
but the little village school is bolted shut.
One teacher joined a katiba from Homs a week
after the other one was shot.
Ghosts in the alleyways under the eaves with knives and hit
lists hidden in their sleeves.
Who were the grocer, neighbor, carpenter, at least
that is what everyone believes.
When I was 23 or 24, I'd have some revelation in a bar
and write it down and get another drink like my friend
Omar, no not that Omar.
The lucky exiles drink their arak,
call for more mudardara and muttabal.
Newly arrived, the cook's thin artist son
paints hunger strikers on the cafe wall.
We eat grapes and pistachios while we
debate the relevance of theory.
She's couch surfing, she can look for a job
now she's officially a refugee.
After his talk on gins in the Quran, requisite drinks
with almost everyone, he Skypes his older sister in Tartous
to ask if she's had word yet from her son.
Bright in the pink and green of your indoors, a screen set
with your mother's miniatures of village life
remembered in Iran.
Her memories, not yours, becoming yours.
Tents stretch to the horizon, nothing green, no bread,
no books, no fruit, no gasoline.
The boy best in his class at sports and math
has diarrhea in a trench latrine.
The bright and brief parenthesis won't last.
Dawn hesitates, the sky is overcast.
Rain cross hatches its notes on yellow leaves,
like headlines, like footsteps approaching fast.
Children flock around the tired balding
man who summons language that was once his own,
remembers his grandmother's formula, and begins the tale.
Kan ya ma kan''.
Which means once upon a time an Arabic.
We--