Politics And The English Language
Beirut
One last thing you must remember,
my old man said, before sitting down to cards,
give them an inch, and they’ll take a yard….
I never was too fond of proverbs orthe grieving
children of the dud, moot point, sired
by the ashen taste of final breaths, dregs, swansongs, academics,
fathered by a book-learnt quieting of desire.
But there is wisdom in the stale and dried-out brief
of an idiom like that, locked and packed and seething
in its burly lock with years of living history
distilled, condensed, culled to a kind of brimming crystal,
shaped to the smallest point of understanding that love can give.
The cliché of the Zionists has no real depth of mystery, he said.
And then he swiped a joker from the middle of the table.
By Omar Sabbagh, 10/04/2026
Among The Cynics
This is the last possible murder,
the last still-shot, frieze,
a picture caught in the trap of its own geography,
the last of the Levantine colors,
the mischief of invention, a certain cleverness
so quick to unweave the thread that might have led
them home. They will never forget
the theft that brought them here
and in failing to forget be stuck here forever.
And I can commiserate.
And I can log myself in the same dead
groove, a slotted place
where nothing’s allowed to move,
victims of the life a warmed love once gave.
And when the last daft cynic here dies
tears will be the gloss of my aging eyes
and I will read the ending
of all my certainties;
and the swansong, from white to white, will befinished, sung.
Beirut, 02/04/2026
Verse In A Time Of War?
Is there ever a window that is true
to hurt? Ever a sky to the sky’s sky-blue?
I walk with words, and try to know with words;
I try to soften the bone-hard edge of the world
about me –but does it ever do
any justice to what has no true name,
no grip or grasp of hand,
no salving, solution, none of the ache of wisdom
or of wisdom’s clean-run ends, her white ablutions?
I wake to how the world accrues
in sharpness its worldliness, addling the brass
of our wounds, slinking in deviousness our curse
into pockets we’ll never quite see –no, not fully…
Still, though, there is verse. Open pain. And my beloved country.
Beirut, 08/03/2026
Refugee
An older man slumped
in a white-cushioned chair.
He is trying to forget
being here or the silver
colour of his hair.
In the place of the younger
his life would be different
he can’t but wager,
and the living would once more thrum
to the spin of the spinning ball,
to the rig and tug of the roulette table
the young must take life for…
Out of idleness here, a placid innocence
the oak of his pain gains in
clarity, prescience, he whispers to himself,
its thickset ash-brown colour a reminder
of what the rings of time have shelved
behind him and before. No book remains
to be a shelter for his wisdom.
A war is afoot. Danger turns a word for home.
Tavolina, ABC Mall, Verdun, Beirut, 06/03/2026
War Again
Flames and coal-grey spires
The alphabet,
the black-set, lettered limbs
of our warzone once again,
each man and woman
and each child they’ve sired
engaged to the dark-red wound
in the room of the world
and in the world’s dark room,
and space a wilderness gone wild
again, dust and matterless matter
and the heart’s now-
tottering, now-spluttering boom
like hellish dancers
in the same-old, same-old
bacchanal
of man and his dreadful twin:
a war whose dark and sinister end
is never,
is never,
is never
to create or to begin…
And my daughter
in the safer distance,
and my daughter,
and the sorrowing fall
of the in-wending of a girl’s
inheritance
of a world like ours sheared
of all due, bound sense:
and strands and orphans
of shorn, thick wool
to block and stopper
the ears and eyes
with death and destruction
and the patness of a time
of human logic
defiled now by how it defies
all speech, all tall-back,
the dignity of one’s aging imagination.
And only blood now too hot
for the nude and ruddy skin
it courses throughout, inside;
and only red now remaining or soot
the colour
of any last,
of any white,
of any of the lasting finish
of any kind
of older, whiter religion….
Beirut, 05/03/2026