As a part of its continuing effort to share a portion of the literary wealth of Arabic poetry with the English reader, The Arab American News translates a poem by Syrian poet Muhammad Maghout.

Maghout was a poet, playwright and essayist, who spent a lifetime advocating for political freedom in an Arab World run by totalitarian regimes. He was born in Salamiya, a town near Hama in Syria, in 1934. He passed away in April of 2006 at age 72. 

Our tombs are dark on the hill,

And the night is falling on the valley,

Marching between the snow and the trenches.

And my father is returning dead on his golden horse.

The coughing of forests

And rustle of the broken wheels

Palpitate from his feeble chest.

And the lost grown between the boulders

Is singing a song for the lost man,

For the blonde children and the dead herd on the stone bank.

Oh mountains that are covered with snow and rocks

Oh river that accompanies my father in his estrangement

Let me be snuffed out like a candle in the wind. 

I suffer like the water around the ship.

The pain is spreading its traitorous wing,

And the death that’s hanging on the side of the horse

Is puncturing my heart like the look of a teenage girl,

Like the groan of the freezing wind.