To Amal
To Amal (Because your name means hope)
By Hedy Habra
How can one think of better
days when streets
swarm
with armed men,
their uniforms
changing
with
the drift of war
their faces the same,
their eyes, your son's eyes.
Amal, your name means hope,
yet years
go by, darkening
days with violent ink,
night's pulse
resounding
through splattered walls,
treacherous alleys.
And what’s left
of your sweet name,
when deafened
by the sound of anger,
you dream you're lost in Beirut's
neighborhoods,
in search
of a way home
in the midst
of rubble,
faceless gunmen
check your ID
for a Cross or a Crescent,
at every intersection.
Unable to withhold your boy's finger
from the trigger,
you lie,
your nightmare, a faint echo
of raging battles.
Hedy Habra’s third poetry collection, The Taste of the Earth, is forthcoming from Press 53 (2019). Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and was finalist for the International Poetry Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Poetry Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Awards, she was a fourteen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work appears in Cimarron Review, Bitter Oleander, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Mizna, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Verse Daily. Her website is hedyhabra.com