A song to the nation

Tell me O.. Sun!
Tell me who extracted you from my eye
And offered me this lens instead,
Small is this land strip!
Have I lived in this tin all my life;
a peddler just passed by
as if a wool cloud,
Or maybe I imagined him passing by;
I will take off his dreams in striptease saloons in a foreign land
And imagine myself a crystal castle.

أغنية للوطن
يا شمسا من اقتلعك من عيني
وأهداني هده العدسة
أفي ذا القم عشت طول ذا الزمن
مر بائع متجول كسحابة صوف
أم حسبته مر
في المهجر سأقتلع أحلامه في قاعاث اسثريبثيز
وأثخيلني سرايا كريستال

The Haymaker

The field of rice and wheat
totter and sway
then sag in your crooked
hazy horizons.

About the Singer

For she thought the guitar
and the music
would be the tent that shelters the poem,
she once upon a time
created the singer.

About creation

The heel I came from
was mine before the wreckage.
All along these years of drought and famine,
my amnesic chamber has held hostage
saturated rich soils and spiky wonders,
I promise if I ever surface, I will trust a seed
in your palm.

Poems and illustration by Jamila Ouriour