Al Moqawama
(The Resistance)

We have to embrace the idea that we are the leaders we are looking for. - Grace Lee Boggs

By Allah, if I see that on one side is the truth and on the other side all the rest of the people I, without caring and paying heed to those reproaching me, will fight all alone with my sword, on the way and path of the right, against them. - Emir Ali ibn Abi Taleb, pbuh.

War is not the time for poetry -
that is for the evenings
of old men in other lands
who ring the bells with the hope
to commute their sentence
and barter time
with the ancients in senate.

Dare I say that?

But we are steadfast
at heart and know
a warning has to find
the warned, has to abandon
the bles-sed for a while.
A warner has to call
the laggers to the front
one by one in order
to cut them down
or send them off.

We prayed on those nights
for ourselves. We prayed
for the ones who crawled
through the fields
on their bellies.
We watched the skies
and hoped the bombs
might be jubilations.

They weren't.

The tarmac and the dairy,
every single bridge gone.
The last long drive through
abandoned streets

- past stockpiles
of the rice and metal
left by on the other
side of the sea -

never really ends
once it begins.

The bitterness of translation
is the joy of understanding,
and vice versa.
There will be more of this.