The Grain of Our Hearts

On a pale cold
winter’s night
the tents sleep
bitter in mouth
and heart.
With subdued sound
running after an escaping sun,
they remove their morning dress
off bodies
patched with jokes
and painful laughter.
The tents become lilies
sleeping on sadness
and pale moans.
Hallucinating with the names of absent
lovers,
martyrs,
and women promising
stories
poetry
and a touch of madness

The tents sleep
without a balcony filled
with music
and longing.
They rewrite history
and geography.
They dry the pains of the lands
with a laugh,
a bloodless carnation.
Possessing nothing but essence
and longing
in voids of absence.

The tents sleep
and cleanse
their dreams of immortality.
They chew the night unhurriedly
leaning against their shadows
and bending toward the sea
for healing.

This war
is startling with all its losses.
It bakes its food from the grain of our hearts.
The giants curse it
and the Canaanites.
Our Mother Ghoul chews
whenever her spirit sighs
with fleeting desire on the shoulders of passersby.
It prepares the loaves of death
for goers
comers
who are clad in life’s agony
and hope spilt
on a misleading road.
It never was
a lifeline.
But war it is
unloading its cargo
of losses.
So we lose
and lose
and lose

Translation from the Arabic