Maps and Oil Lamps

(Kuwait - 2003)

I saw your tanks on the way to school today.
Metals screeching and piercing, still, sands
unyielding.
Sparks fume in the friction and
crawler belts drag the bedrock apart.

You mark our brothers, sisters, us, in red,
despotic desire to play warden,
and I wonder. At the integrity of your
laws, principles and so-called politics of
liberation,
as plates are laid out for those who don’t return.
There is no monopoly on maps and oil lamps.

Smoke pervades from distant engines.
Impelled by the fuel of fervour, by
perorations for ‘democracy’, oh how
it arms you with dividends. You
shop
for enemies and mandate that we pay the
price for munitions. If my only
weapon is prayer, know that it is heard,
as the soul’s deepest supplication.

Leave us. To the vastness that is the desert.
Leave us to nurse soft cries of new
life.
To fill our plates and larger
shoes as our tribes gather.
To comb the silver in our hair.

You bulldoze, your creed of callousness,
And now we’re pushed to the skies.
I whisper goodbye to this boundless beige.
My head resting on my family’s
shoulders –
filled with a life in this caravanserai.
Breathe. Leave it to the Almighty, the one
whom each grain reveres. This remembrance
is a lantern. It gently glows in the subconscious.