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Live Encounters Gaza Poetry & Writing, January 2024
No avail, poem by Al-Mothanna Alcheikh Atiah.
No avail
I am looking for the blind God who
Does not distinguish between the kind of flesh
At his dinner table
For the ancestors of his brother’s killer
For the neutral pimps on the sidewalks of the right and left
In tired cities
And for the foolish criminals of this war
To give them my special thanks
For arming me with the immunity to resist being killed by excessive emotions
From seeing children piling up dead every day
With faces disfigured with blood and stained with rubble dust
With crushed bodies and missing limbs
With limbs searching for bodies, they had imagined
That the names engraved on them, identify them
Children crowding
At my dinner table
In front of a television screen that keeps counting
Two, three, four, tens, hundreds
One thousand five thousand ten thousand
With massacres, massacres buried in the blossoms of oblivion
Children ascending in droves
From every deep hole dug by shells
They fall in pieces from the sky
Pieces, pieces, pieces, pieces, pieces, pieces
It provides me with the immunity of killing me
By the effect of their sharing
My cup of wine
By their health from the error of safety
By their safety, which is no longer on the bids of murder
By thanking them for this effective vaccine
And their pollution of my tongue with the impudence of the question
Hey kids!
If you are
Likewise, like me, you were armed
With the affect of shells by your vision of me
I eat my dinner on the rhythm of aircraft bombing
They scatter
Your bodies
With your names
On my table
© Al-Mothanna Alcheikh Atiah
Al-Mothanna Alcheikh Atiah, a Syrian poet and novelist, was born in Deir ez-Zor – Syria in 1953. He graduated from the College of Agriculture in Damascus in 1980. He published a poetry collection for Dar Al-Haqiqat in Beirut under the title “Yes, there is More” in 1979, and a collection of poetry under the title “Mouth of The Rose” in 1989, and a novel under the title “Lady of the Kingdom” in 2006, from the Arab Foundation for Studies and Publishing in Beirut. In addition, he published a critical book under the title “The Poetic Rhythm of the Intifada” in 1990 from Dar Al-Aswar in Akka. He worked in journalism as managing editor for cultural affairs in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper in 1984 and managing editor of the new Shahrazad magazine in Cyprus in 1990.