Hama

It is sad that one has nothing else to offer but the words of a poet in the face of the political upheaval in Syria, where governess troops have killed over 2000 of their own people, have imprisoned scores, disregarding civil rights and freedom of expression by their citizens. The governement bullets found even a barely one year old baby. Violence does not work, brings only grief.

The poem Hama was written in Dutch by Bart Stouten when peace reigned for a while. See salon12b for the Dutch original and the German Translation

HAMA

This summer weeds turned on

the watermills of Hama.

Shredded memories?

The old aqueduct won't ever again

cast them off. Where once was the field

now the consolation of a poster Old Hama:

it is Assad, father and son

and 30.000 dead. Look

how explosive they grow,

overgrowing a year

about which the city doesn't speak.

Like a child feeling found out,

twenty years later:

collective memory,

waiting for my ride.

A cart jolting and jerking

with no where to go.

The set repertoire of a folktale-teller

no one has seen.

Somewhere I'll find him

says Lonely Planet.

His world invitingly

ajar. Like the window.

Elsewhere, other-worldly:

two old people

in a mobil home at the Orontes river.

Belgians sure enough.

She peels an apple,

he tells the story,

in bits and pieces.

*

Hate got stuck, like a record,

lack of understanding, like a memory, in awful hunch

like stale beer after closing time,

while the rain wails on the sidewalk

and the sidewalk slowly turns to leaves         

from a drunken dessert with the wobbly camel

of an awful hunch.                                               

Like a record that got stuck, the muezzin wails

that you are dead, like lost sheep

in a late afternoon sun. Not a shepherd to be seen

as far as history still goes, and that is further

than your oath of secrecy. In unreadable reality

comes an Arab newspaper with strangle-sounds

and arabesques for show, with glasses Nescafe

paid for by the Baath party.

Hate hung around, on the shore of the Orentes river,

in my sub-chilled dessert, air-conditioned

in the reflection of the high minaret

which this morning continues to cry out my old love.