Poetry: Ashraf AboArafe
No people but the Arabs
have sold their dreams in foreign markets,
fought wars on behalf of their enemy,
and cast their homelands into the abyss of oblivion—
dragging them half a century backward.
They fund their own ruin,
slaughter their sons with their own knives,
so the enemy may rest secure
upon pillows stuffed with the blood of innocents.
This is the age of wonders:
a stance that makes you weep, another that stuns you,
some erased like chalk on an old wall,
others carved forever into the memory of disgrace.
In the far West,
a Jewish woman rebelled against her Israel,
cast off her identity and declared:
“We are not the victims we claimed—
we are the villains of the tale.”
In the heart of Arabia,
a preacher forbids aid to Gaza,
mocks the besieged,
and rains curses upon the starving!
In Washington, analysts confessed:
Iran’s retaliation shattered their schemes,
while some Arabs
begged Trump
to strike harder,
to topple Tehran’s walls.
The shock came
when China’s president told the East:
“You could have been a pole to rival us,
but you sold your fate to a man
who knows nothing of politics
but deals and extortion.”
And behold America,
raising yet another veto
to block a ceasefire for Gaza,
then nominating its president
for the Nobel Peace Prize!
But wonder lies not in the Sleepers of the Cave,
who slumbered three hundred years then rose again,
but in a nation that slept fourteen centuries—
and has yet to awaken.
And the conscious Arab remains…
a soul torn apart,
a heart crucified,
wandering between a lost homeland
and an exile without end.
