bil 3arabi: 6 poems by Sara Saleh

By | 5 December 2019
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
little city


little city, on your scorched days Rania and I pool our

khamsmiyehs, buy Bonjus from baqqal abu Fadi, sell them

for triple the price, “dollar law samaht”, this country has us

believing we are so clever, so entrepreneurial, them

neighborhood kids should be grateful, “khalto, look at

us, don’t we make you

proud?”


little city, on your anxious nights we gather in

balconies, lighthouse beacons with little-to-no

light, wreathed in smoke, we wait, we

sit, we speak, we speak over each

other, “ya 3layeh inshaAllah”, no one

actually wants to hear the answers,

I can’t afford to trust the morning,

I am still learning to believe it when it

comes.


little city, we want to sing, want to giggle silly over

boys and simple things, but you have different

plans, young men on tanks cuss loudly, young

men on tanks whistle at us, eyes open

empty, this dark, this shatter,

we tell them we have God, but

I don’t think they believe

us.


little city, we climb to the top of the steeple

stairs, quiet and quieter, past jasmine

bushes, past bullet holes, confetti

of ‘86, no one bothers with

plaster, is it any wonder we don’t have

mothers and fathers, how long will you

hate yourself into something we can

love? 


little city, trying to forget


little city, how did you survive,

what did they call you…

before Syria, before Israel, before France, before

Ottoman…

before, before…


little city, what becomes of history

if there remain no artists to write of it?


your pages are long, your patience

longer.
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Sara M Saleh is a human rights campaigner, poet, writer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, living on Gadigal land. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in English and Arabic in various national and international outlets including the Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, Overland Journal, Kill Your Darlings, Red Room, Rabbit Poetry, the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, and global anthologies Making Mirrors, Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word, A Blade of Grass, and Borderless: a transnational anthology of feminist poetry. She has run poetry workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country, and has performed nationally and internationally. She is co-editor of the 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. She is the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. She is currently developing her first novel Songs For The Dead and The Living as a recipient of the inaugural Affirm Press Mentorship for Sweatshop Western Sydney. She sits on the board of national advocacy organisation GetUp! and is a proud Bankstown Poetry Slam ‘Slambassador’.

More by Sara M Saleh on Cordite Poetry Review →

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