Tag: poetry

Arab leaders, what do you want?

A poem published in the Arab literary culture magazine, Asameena. It asks a simple question to Arab tyrants, what do you want?

“Dignity before Bread” (Image by Adriana Vidano).

You want it all.

You want nothing,

You want to brandish authority without legitimacy,

Elections without accountability,

Sing the merits of citizenship without citizens,

Praise civil society without the civil or society,

Boast of human rights without humans with rights,

Demand efficiency without transparency,

Hope for a professional press without its freedom,

Desire a robust judiciary without integrity,

Can one attain happiness without justice?

You dream of your universities entering the ranks of the most high, but critical thought will not qualify.

You summon gender equality without women,

You want to enforce religion without the divine reckoning,

You want to build mosques without a soul,

Churches without a voice,

You are all ambition without humility,

You are malls without public seats, malls without alternatives.

The speculative future without the touchable present,

You want the reap without the sow,

You want the glory of history without its lessons,

You want the glory of history without its preservation,

You want the glory of history without its inevitable equaliser – mortality.

You want the west without the east, the east without the rest.

Your world is a world of glistening buildings, solid bridges, and long highways, but no people.

You see no people, you hear no people, you know no people.

You are the slow release of anesthesia spreading through the decrepit hospital corridors under the rapid flicker of fluorescent lights.

~Amro Ali (Tunis, 31 July 2018)

The Lightbulb and the Loss

A poem published in the Arab literary culture magazine, Asameena. It is a take on the global vanishing of the warm incandescent yellow lightbulbs as the cold dystopian LED takes over.

“His only rival” – The Mazda incandescent lightbulb (1909).

“Look around you at a world that has changed, you’re aging and wasting energy. It is better for you to hurry up and die!” snapped Fluorescent and LED.

“I’m more than a string of incandescent lamps on a film star’s mirror,” Lightbulb replied.

“The sun daily melts away but never forgets to breathe her yellow warmth into me to guide writers through the night’s solace.

The fire that merrily hops across candles on a romantic date is my patron.

While you’re the frozen food aisle that escaped into the world and unleashed a devastating plague,

My light inspired by fire, your light, born of nightmares.

You worship numbers, I write stories,

You deepen anxiety, I soften melancholia,

You sterilize hearts, I mend them,

You spread shapelessness, I shape contours,

You show clothes, I reveal souls,

You make customers, I make humans,

You’re bland ideology, I’m passionate philosophy.

What crimes have you committed on the streets of Rome? Turning a stroll along an ambient-lit cobbled lane into a hasty getaway?

You’ve imposed a death sentence on the eternal city, for even Nero’s great fire emitted a dignified splendor.

My golden halo hovering over every city slowly bursts – one by one – at the hands of petty bureaucrats for your white glare to blow up into a mushroom cloud – the inferno of the same.

One big stadium is not what a city makes.

Yet perhaps my mystery and refinement can no longer find a home in a world robbed of imagination,

I part with these last words,

Fraudulent LED, you’re merely the chemotherapy to Fluorescent’s eye cancer,

Perilous Fluorescent, while you linger on only to expel mercury, my tribe will be reminisced for giving glory to Mercury.”

~Amro Ali (Alexandria, December 2017)

Passport, the fallen

Despite traveling most of my life on an Australian passport, I came to write this prose poem as I’ve been moved by the stories and witnessing of countless friends and strangers traveling on less mobile passports and the torment they have had to endure at airports and consulates. 

Illustration by F.T. Janes, from the novel “Angel of the Revolution,” George Griffith (1893) pg. 371. The fantastical tale explored the future of air travel, warfare, inequalities and social responsibility.

Passport, the Fallen

I never met that medieval Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, for I would have beset his world travels with heartache crueler than the sea storms that unsettled him,

Known as a travel document, I am more document than travel,

For I am not of the blessed.

They played with my ancestry: I went from world to third-world, developing world, and global south,

As if colourful names ever granted me admission to the geographies of privilege.

I catch a glimpse of my compatriots squeezed between sweaty nervous human hands at passport controls where humanity sheds the pretense of fraternity and re-glues inequalities,

I watch desk officers execute the parochial wave of the times,

A predatory international relations system telescoped into an arbitrary being void of thought,

I am reminded that I have so much power of disdain,

I keep security needlessly occupied and transits an end in themselves,

I make borders out of iron and visas out of alchemy,

I prolong queues into creeping anacondas,

while turning immigration controls into life stations,

Did you know I can unravel life’s plans?

I make families miss their flights,

Laborers forgo their grandmother’s funerals,

Couples reschedule their honeymoons,

Students skip their graduations,

Scholars show up late to conferences,

Journalists lose their story,

Merchants scale back their dreams,

Refugees. Die.

I turn Africa into Alcatraz with no parole,

remake Asia into arcades with no fire exits,

Cast the undesired Americas into an ailment with no remedy,

while watching Europe send her Marco Polo tribes to a playground called Earth.

I dance with fate, whispering in her ear: who can fall in love with whom, who can discover a new realm where, who can seek sanctuary when, who can question their very being and why.

I am the butcher of stories, curiosities, aspirations and encounters.

I am the sorcerer that makes the Indian backpacker invisible,

I am the heirloom of the troubled nation-state, the algebra of colonial logic, the archangel of a geopolitical apartheid,

Bordering. Ordering. Bothering. Othering.

I trigger a silent cry across the planet: “We never asked for this world.”

~Amro Ali (Seville, 16 July 2018)