MER Article Two Poems About Palestine In the Refugee Camp The huts were of mud and hay, their thin roofs feared the rain, and walls slouched like humbled men. The streets were laid out in a grid, as in New York, but without the dignity of names or asphalt. Dust reigned. Women grew pale chickens and children feeding them fables from the Sharif Elmusa, Nizar Qabbani • 1 min read
MER Article An Invitation for the Fifth of June I For the fifth year you come to us lugging a burlap sack on your back, barefoot, on your face the sadness of heavens and the pain of Hussein. We’ll receive you at every airport with flower bouquets, and drink -- to your health -- rivers of wine. We’ll sing and recite insincere poems in your presen Nizar Qabbani • 1 min read
MER Article Hawi, Naked in Exile Khalil Hawi, Naked in Exile (The Threshing Floors of Hunger) (trans. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard) (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1985). Barbara Harlow • 1 min read
The Amazing Road The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, collected and translated by A.M. Elmessiri, illustrated by Kamal Boullata, Arabic calligraphy by Adel Horan, (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1982). Barbara Harlow • 7 min read
MER Article "Sometimes I Have a Feeling of Foreignness" Erez Bitton’s second collection of Hebrew poems, The Book of Mint, appeared in Israel last summer, three years after Moroccan Afternoon. Bitton is an unusual man by any standard. He was born in Oran, Algeria, in 1942 and immigrated to Israel shortly after the establishment of the state in 1948. His Ken Brown • 7 min read
MER Article Poems for the Women of Egypt The Future and the Ancestor The dead’s right grain ls woven in our flesh within the channels of the blood Sometimes we bend beneath the fullness of ancestors. But the present that shatters walls, banishes boundaries and invents the road to come, rings on. Right in the center of our lives liberty Nazik al-Mala’ika, Marzieh Ahmadi Ooskwi, Andrée Chedid • 1 min read
