God save America My home sweet home! *** The French general who raised his tricolour over Nagrat al-Salman where I was a prisoner thirty years ago . . . in the middle of that U-turn that split the back of the Iraqi army, the general who loved St Emilion wines called Nagrat al-Salman a fort . . . Of the surface of the earth, generals know only two dimensions: whatever rises is a fort whatever spreads is a battlefield. How ignorant the general was! But Liberation was better versed in topography. The Iraqi boy who conquered her front page sat carbonised behind a steering wheel on the Kuwait--Safwan highway while television cameras (the booty of the defeated and their identity) were safe in the truck like a storefront on rue Rivoli. The neutron bomb is highly intelligent, it distinguishes between an ìIî and an ìIdentityî. *** God save America My home sweet home! *** Blues How long must I walk to Sacramento How long will I walk to reach my home How long will I walk to reach my girl How long must I walk to Sacramento For two days, no boat has sailed this stream two days, two days, two days Honey, how can I ride? I know this stream but, O but, O but, for two days no boat has sailed this stream *** La L La La L La La L La La L La A stranger gets scared Don't fear dear horse Don't fear the wolves of the wild Don't fear for the land is my land La L La La L La La L La La L La A stranger gets scared *** ____________ My home sweet home! translated by Khaled Mattawa*** I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island and Long John Silver's parrot and the terraces of New Orleans I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco. But I am not American. Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age! I need neither oil, nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the donkey. Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this wooden bridge. I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers. I need the village not New York. Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to the teeth? Why did you come all the way to distant Basra where fish used to swim by our doorsteps. Pigs do not forage here. I only have these water buffaloes lazily chewing on water lilies. Leave me alone soldier. Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear. Leave me my migrating birds and the green plumes. Take your roaring iron birds and your Tomahawk missiles. I am not your foe. I am the one who wades up to the knees in rice paddies. Leave me to my curse. I do not need your day of doom. *** God save America My home sweet home! *** America let us exchange your gifts. Take your smuggled cigarettes and give us potatoes. Take James Bond's golden pistol and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle. Take the heroin syringe under the tree and give us vaccines. Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries and give us village homes. Take the books of your missionaries and give us paper for poems to defame you. Take what you do not have and give us what we have. Take the stripes of your flag and give us the stars. *** Take the Afghani Mujahideen's beard and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies. Take Saddam Hussain and give us Abraham Lincoln or give us no one. *** Now as I look across the balcony across the summer sky, the summery summer Damascus spins, dizzied among television aerials then it sinks, deeply, in the stories of the forts and towers and the arabesques of ivory and sinks, deeply, from Rukn al-Din then disappears from the balcony. *** And now I remember trees: the date palm of our mosque in Basra, at the end of Basra the bird's beak and a child's secret a summer feast. I remember the date palm. I touch it. I become it, when it falls black without fronds when a dam fell hewn by lightning. And I remember the mighty mulberry when it rumbled, butchered with an axe . . . to fill the stream with leaves and birds and angels and green blood. I remember when pomegranate blossoms covered the sidewalks, the students were leading the workers' parade . . . *** The trees die pummelled dizzied, not standing the trees die. *** God save America My home sweet home! *** We are not hostages, America and your soldiers are not God's soldiers . . . We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods the gods of bulls the gods of fires the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song . . . We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor who emerges out of the farmers' ribs hungry and bright and raises heads up high . . . America, we are the dead Let your soldiers come Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him We are the drowned ones, dear lady *** We are the drowned Let the water come *** Damascus, 20 August 1995 ________________ Translated by Khaled Mattawa