Potry: Ashraf AboArafe
I see no people but the Arabs,
who sold their dreams in the markets of strangers,
who fought wars on behalf of their enemy,
and cast their homelands into the abyss of forgetting,
dragging them half a century backward.
They fund their own ruin with their hands,
they slaughter their children with their knives,
so the enemy may sleep in comfort
upon a pillow of the innocents’ blood.
This is the age of wonders:
a scene here brings you to tears, another there strikes your face—
stances erased like chalk on an old wall,
while others cling to the memory of disgrace.
In the distant West,
a Jewish woman rebelled against her Israel,
cast off her identity and declared with courage:
“We were never the victims as we claimed,
we were the villains of the tale.”
But in the Arabian Peninsula,
a cleric forbids aid to Gaza,
mocking the besieged,
hurling curses upon the hungry!
And in Washington,
analysts confessed:
Iran’s response unsettled their calculations,
while some Arabs went begging Trump
to finish the strike,
to tear down Tehran’s walls!
The shock came…
when China’s president addressed the East:
“You could have been a pole to rival us,
but you sold your destiny to a man
who knows nothing of politics—
but deals and blackmail!”
And behold America,
brandishing yet another veto
to block a ceasefire in Gaza,
then nominating its president for the Nobel Peace Prize!
Yet the marvel is not
the People of the Cave
who slept three hundred years then rose,
but a nation that has slumbered fourteen centuries
and has not awakened still!
And so the conscious Arab remains…
torn in spirit,
crucified in heart,
wandering between a homeland lost
and an exile without borders.
