Live Encounters Arab Poetry & Writing July 2026
And I, Who Make Kings, poems by Mostafa Ebada.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
And I, Who Make Kings
As for me, I’m just a simple worker,
and sometimes a poet.
I saw the king’s son
eating an apple and smiling.
I built his father’s pyramid.
I carried the stones on my shoulders.
With my own hands, I paved his way.
Every stone I carried,
I filled with a sad poem
made of sweat and the salt of eyelids.
My hours are slow,
my days know no rest.
My work is never seen,
and every hardship
came back to me as emptiness and regret.
I built nothing for myself.
Now I stand before myself,
carving myself in silence,
to shape from myself a soft brick
where a lamp may rest,
lighting up disappointment and longing.
At dawn,
when light withdraws from the stones of the gods,
I hear the groaning and the hymns.
I hear what is never said
and what wounds the heart.
As if time is reminding itself:
Here we were born.
We are the children of dust and gold.
We wrote our names on nothingness
and sent them to God
on ships made of our suffering.
We thought eternity would listen.
The Nile was our only witness
it flows and does not wait,
it flows and does not weep.
It carries its kings
the same way it carries the children of the poor.
I am a simple worker, troubled by nothing
neither suffering nor eternity.
I only wanted a grave
next to the king’s son,
to keep him company,
so he wouldn’t have to eat the apple of the afterlife alone.
I am a simple worker.
Sometimes I give up poetry.
I cook pebbles and sins.
My provisions are dreams and hope.
I have no wife,
no path.
I learned that eternity,
when called by name, dies;
and when forgotten, is born.
I saw in the sweat streaming from my brow
a river of the first breath.
And in the dust covering my body,
Adam’s ash.
I remain
in the thought that is never spoken,
in the hand that works without asking,
in the letter not yet born,
in the eternity you build
and then cannot bear witness to.
I was never a servant to the king.
I was a believer in the idea of eternity within him.
I am the worker who forgot himself.
The stone I lift
is heavier than the meaning of life.
And I remain
in the question that was never written
at the pyramid’s entrance:
Who builds because he was here
will remain in every stone
even if unnamed.
I saw the king’s son
eating an apple and smiling,
while I built his father a staircase to the clouds
from the dust of the question
and the glow of nothingness.
The air around us spells out my name
but doesn’t recognize it.
It refuses to utter it,
while shadows rearrange my face
so it won’t look older than his.
The echo around us is more honest than we are.
And the apple completes its fall, slowly
as if it regrets it.
I am the hand that raised the first stone
of the final pyramid.
I am the heart that stopped
so the straight line wouldn’t fall.
The king sleeps in his golden coffin,
and I, in the memory of the wind,
lament myself and laugh
longing for a bite
of the afterlife’s apple.
He Who Never Betrayed His Hardship
He plants the land of others, faithfully.
He whispers to the mud and the growing things.
He murmurs to the wind to calm the sun above his head.
The birds love him, the people, and the road.
He charmed me from behind, in the dark
mocking jinn and demons
and the ghosts of night.
The dead were his purest friends.
When he catches my fear, he speaks to the air
as if commanding someone I cannot see,
then says to me:
“There, the jinn and demons have settled, come on.”
Night is his favorite stage
the trees, the animals,
the life of water.
He sits for hours, muttering,
as if I were the only one there.
He sends me to the ends of the earth,
protected by my terror of him
and of the wind that turns into giant men
so I can check on the crops of others
as if they were our own.
He never betrayed his hardship.
His joy was planted by the sowers
greening like a lover’s night.
And when everything ripens,
he sits alone in front of the house, staring ahead,
watching over a joy
that moves slowly through his veins
the way water moves through the veins of a patient palm.
And he smiles at the earth that was watered with sweat
until it thought it only grew for others.
I sit in his shadow,
and the urge to sing comes over me:
He gave the black soil youth’s own dew
yet never owned the fields or the gardens.
Joy walks slowly in his blood
as patience’s pores were soaked, moment by moment.
As if his veins were patient palms
when watered with irrigation, they softened.
Before I left him on his deathbed,
he said to me:
“Don’t believe the sand.
The road is truer than all footsteps.
And the wind is not neutral
it only oppresses the poor
and those passing through.
Trust only the plants.
They can take and they can give.
They suck the spirit from the soil,
and from the water, its solitude.
Only they defy the wind and the sand.
I am the history of his solitude.
And I took his soul and his mark.
We were the loneliest people,
and the richest.
We never returned from the field alone
we carried back the night and the mud,
the smell of water,
and our fading fear of everything.”
The fields grew less reassuring.
And I no longer fear anything but the emptiness
left by a man who spoke to the air
and made the world less desolate.
And I am angry at him
for taking all the noise with him
and leaving me to speak to the air like him,
as if it would answer back.
© Mostafa Ebada
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.
Mostafa Ebada (born 1965) is an acclaimed Egyptian journalist, poet, essayist, and literary critic. He currently serves as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Al Arabi Magazine and holds the position of cultural advisor for several prominent Egyptian publishing houses, including The Egyptian Lebanese House, Al-Mahrousa Center, and Dar Batana. With a prolific career spanning multiple creative fields, Ebada has authored over 10 books encompassing poetry collections, cultural studies, and literary critiques, solidifying his reputation as a versatile and influential figure in contemporary Arabic literature.