These Days: A Poem by Alexandra Karam

My comparative literature background is far behind me, but not so far that I couldn’t respond to the power and poignancy of this poem.  Nonviolence usually stays in the ‘real,’ being cautious about the symbolic, but nonviolence is nothing if not creative, and this is an example of creativity put to the best possible use.  May it speak to us all.

Michael Nagler

***

These Days

by Alexandra Karam

From my bedroom in the city

I hear the sea rise toward me

and inside the sea

the far ocean singing,

sweeping its churning tides

ceaselessly ashore.

Across the Mediterranean Sea

night has fallen in Syria

where a century ago

Grandfather walked with his family

on journeys across eastern borders,

visiting from Ehden in the mountains of Lebanon.

Syria devastated

prepares for devastation,

night has fallen,

Oh bury tomorrow, and all the days after

The sea rocks the boats in the port of Marseille

and the far ocean sweeps light-struck tunnels of water

ceaselessly ashore, through the night and the day,

gulls cry from their home in the air

circling the foaming line where salt meets sand

.

while the bombs fall on Damascus

and all the stories ever told there

lie smoldering in the undone earth.

 

Tomorrow, in a thousand years, children in school will read

inaccurate chronicles of this day

and the light of heaven will shine on the silvery sea

and the inconsolable earth.