WEBVTT

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This is from a series of poems
written what you will recognize

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as the Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát
stanza and the Rubáiyát

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actually just means quatrain
for a stanza of four lines.

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But there was also, I mean,
many other poets in Farsi

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and in Arabic used that form
and one of them was classical

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Arabic poet called al-Ma'arri
who wrote a sequence of these

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quatrains called Luzūm--

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Luzūm mā lam yalzam which
means necessities of what was

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unnecessary.

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And, which I read
in the translation

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of the Lebanese poet
Ameen Rihani, to which

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Fady Joudah alerted me.

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And these are mostly, although
not entirely, about Syria

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and they're dedicated to
Fady and to the Syrian poet

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Golan Haji.

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''The politicians lie and having
lied make grand pronouncements

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about genocide.

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Red lines, civilization, and
the rest elsewhere from anywhere

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anyone died.

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Midsummer's lingering
azure was misspent.

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The morning light is
late and different.

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A man in Ghouta on a shopping
street held his son's hand.

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Now tell me where they went?

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The left knows
intervention by the West

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would be imperial self-interest.

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The teacher came
out of the bakery

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and took a sniper's
bullet in her chest.

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The children whine and
sulk or break things,

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but the little village
school is bolted shut.

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One teacher joined a
katiba from Homs a week

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after the other one was shot.

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Ghosts in the alleyways under
the eaves with knives and hit

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lists hidden in their sleeves.

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Who were the grocer,
neighbor, carpenter, at least

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that is what everyone believes.

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When I was 23 or 24, I'd
have some revelation in a bar

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and write it down and get
another drink like my friend

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Omar, no not that Omar.

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The lucky exiles
drink their arak,

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call for more
mudardara and muttabal.

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Newly arrived, the
cook's thin artist son

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paints hunger strikers
on the cafe wall.

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We eat grapes and
pistachios while we

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debate the relevance of theory.

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She's couch surfing,
she can look for a job

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now she's officially a refugee.

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After his talk on gins in
the Quran, requisite drinks

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with almost everyone, he Skypes
his older sister in Tartous

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to ask if she's had
word yet from her son.

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Bright in the pink and green
of your indoors, a screen set

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with your mother's
miniatures of village life

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remembered in Iran.

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Her memories, not
yours, becoming yours.

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Tents stretch to the horizon,
nothing green, no bread,

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no books, no fruit, no gasoline.

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The boy best in his
class at sports and math

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has diarrhea in
a trench latrine.

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The bright and brief
parenthesis won't last.

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Dawn hesitates, the
sky is overcast.

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Rain cross hatches its
notes on yellow leaves,

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like headlines, like
footsteps approaching fast.

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Children flock around
the tired balding

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man who summons language
that was once his own,

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remembers his grandmother's
formula, and begins the tale.

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Kan ya ma kan''.

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Which means once upon
a time an Arabic.

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We--