Two good poems by Yahia Lababidi

'Palestinian Wail'

Yahia Lababidi he recently made these two poems public from his Collection ‘Palestinian Wail’. He is an Egyptian-American writer and poet who inevitably writes politically, although these two poems have no direct political content. He speaks for the human family. I am moved to pass them on. Despite much previous acclaim he has recently had a hard time publishing this collection.

I was introduced to the poems by https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/a-poetic-love-letter-to-gaza-a-belief-in-hope/ . These dear people and their integrity , along with children’s writer, poet and holocaust historian Michael Rosen, remind me of a brief friendship in the 1960s with a young academic north London couple, Mr & Mrs Cohen, who took off for posts in North America. They patiently took apart one evening all my a-historical arguments in favour of modernisation of the region by a rather obviously aggressive nation state.

    Here are two short poems from his collection Palestinian Wail:
For John
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars – Walt Whitman
There are leaves & petals strewn
on my bedroom & bathroom floor,
as if I’d returned from sleepwalking
in the woods, which, in a sense, I had.
The stroll, with my almost 3-year-old nephew,
ended up being ore of an extended bow –
as the awesome child knelt, reverently,
to gather bits of nature into my pocket.
The green called out to him, wildely & he
responded, exuberantly, collecting
what he could fit into his small palms:
a pretty orange flower, for Lisa,
his sister, who stayed behind
and tiny berries, he called apples
Everything was new, important
and worthy of closer inspection…
a poem which makes you smile,
when you are alone.

Hope
Hope’s not quite as it seems,
it’s slimmer than you’d think
and less steady on its feet.
Sometimes. it’s out of breath
can hardly see ahead
and cries itself to sleep.
It may not tell you all this
or the times it cheated death
but, if you knew it, you’d know