Samer Madbak Poems

Now have I sealed my twenty-second year
Another cycle, my subverted sail
Repudiates repose or change of steer
A crazy craft upon a taxing trail
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I join you brothers in this very night
This holy eve; I come to celebrate,
Across a thousand shores, I levitate,
A ghost! And here I am, we reunite
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'Tis true! Those were the happy times, my friend,
The golden age, and that the treasured glory,
Ere dauntless Doom decreed th’unduly end
And swathed in endless hush the tender story.
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'T may be I stirred the calmness of that world,
Cankered the blooming verdure of these holts.
'T may be the dismal secrets I unfurled
Unto that heart proved none but baleful bolts.
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O brazen heart, enmeshed in sin primeval,
How long will you maintain your wicked ways?
Wherefore your lurid fires remain ablaze?
What mightiness can smother your upheaval?
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No intimate!
These torments cannot pass
To sudden nullity,
They tarry there
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No friend! You can’t lay foot upon this soil
This earth is mine, these endless barren meads
Are all but mine, these poplars and those reeds
Are but the harvest of my fallow toil.
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I am…what am I but the tree of grief
That grows forev’r amid this verdant wood?
An eyesore in this grand beatitude
A foul arborescence, a saffron leaf…
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Forgive me, friend, if I should epilogue
Our little tale, and have my fervor twirled
To gravity, my senses firmly furled,
And calmness once again my spirit’s vogue…
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I saw them standing at the crossroads kerb;
Two schoolers at the prime of pubertye
Conversing under an exuding sky
Half wet! And yet the rain would not disturb
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