Dreaming of a Clear Sky

Dreaming of a clear sky, unmarred by airplanes.
Of clouds observing their own reflection in the windows’ tears.
An innocent day: no news of dead friends in the mail.
Of a home, and a guest, and a sun that lingers for a long visit.
A moment of silence when we wake, without thoughts of bullets.
Of a school year whiled away in the battles of the young;
a secret that we hide like splinters, that we scatter like bees of discord.
A garden whose solitude is softened by a tangled fence.
A dimly lit street, where the wind dances 
for the acacia trees. In any case:
a homeland that’s happy.

But it’s been one hundred years of chanting and clamor, bullets and prisons,
weeping and bleeding and leaving and arriving and dreaming.
One hundred years of conflict and strife, parting and screaming,
tears and crowds and weapons and wounds and singing.
One hundred years of borders and shackles, absence and presence,
treaties and wars and peace and destruction and building.

In any case — it is you, my country, that taught me to write.
What else can I pen, other than my longing?
I love you as much in death as I did in life.
And as I salute you, the military rulers have gone,
and from this site of severance, new hands and legs grow.
The buildings that have kneeled down, I see them rise again,
and the absent ones, we will write down their names, every one,
and give them to our newborns.

I will not let anyone see me in sorrow.
Here I am, a bare mast awaiting your flag.
Drape my shoulders with a bloodied shroud; let me walk before the schoolchildren.
I am the trunk of a cypress tree, reaching its hand up to the clouds.
Everywhere I turn, my country, I see your lost
and longed-for face.

Translation from the Arabic